Senator Joe McCarthy
Anti-Communist


Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was one of the two or three greatest American politicians of the twentieth century. He dominated his era and overshadowed Presidents. His patriotism makes him the Great American Hero.

1908 - born on a farm near Appleton, WI.

1930 - studied engineering and law at Marquette University, Milwaukee.

1935 - Admitted to WI bar.

1938 - Elected Judge of Wisconsin 10th Circuit Court.

1942 - Although exempted because he was a judge, McCarthy volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps. He fought in the South Pacific and flew over 30 combat missions. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, issued the following citation regarding the service of Captain McCarthy:

"For meritorious and efficient performance of duty as an observer and rear gunner of a dive bomber attached to a Marine scout bombing squadron operating in the Solomon Islands area from September 1 to December 31, 1943. He participated in a large number of combat missions, and in addition to his regular duties, acted as aerial photographer. He obtained excellent photographs of enemy gun positions, despite intense anti-aircraft fire, thereby gaining valuable information which contributed materially to the success of subsequent strikes in the area. Although suffering from a severe leg injury, he refused to be hospitalized and continued to carry out his duties as Intelligence Officer in a highly efficient manner. His courageous devotion to duty was in keeping with the highest traditions of the naval service."

1946 - Elected to the U.S. Senate by an overwhelming majority. He was anti-tax and against price, rent and credit controls. His first major act was, even as a new Senator, to lead the fight against continuation of wartime sugar controls.

1950, February 9 - McCarthy made an electrifying speech at Wheeling, West VA, that he had a list of Communists in the State Department. By July he was a major political force. John F. Kennedy told Harvard students that "he knew Joe pretty well, and he may have something." In February 1952, John Kennedy called McCarthy a "great American patriot." In 1953 Bobby Kennedy joined McCarthy's staff and McCarthy was godfather to Bobby's first child. Bobby was always loyal to Joe.
1951, June 14 - McCarthy gave a brilliant speech dissecting the career of
General George Catlett Marshall (Marshall was called by another Senator "a living lie") and his mistakes in World War II. Congressional Record, 82nd Congress pp 6556-6603. It was published as Retreat From Victory, NY:Devin-Adair, 1951. Here is a link to his book online - America's Retreat From Victory, The Story of George C. Marshall McCarthy's two other books, McCarthyism: The Fight for America, which is a comphrehensive answer to his critics then and now, and Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy Delivered in the United States Senate, 1950-1951, (GPO 1953 - includes the Marshall speech) are at questia.com for a fee.

By 1953 - McCarthy was credited with defeating a dozen Democrat senators including Senate majority leader Ernst McFarland, majority whip Francis Myers of PA, powerful 4-term Senator Millard Tydings of MD, Scott Lucas of IL, and Elbert Thomas of UT. McCarthy almost single-handedly destroyed the Democrat party and they vowed revenge. A group of left-wing assassins created a group called the Clearing House to smear McCarthy. They got much of their information from columnist Jack Anderson.


1953 - Joe McCarthy became Chairman of the Committee on Government Operations. His reputation rests almost solely on the events of 1953. In the spring, he investigated waste and mismanagement at Voice of America. In the summer, he investigated the State Department overseas information libraries and 30,000 pro-Communist books were withdrawn from them. In the fall, he investigated the Army and the Defense Department focusing on the spy rings at Ft. Monmouth, NJ. That was where the Rosenbergs had infiltrated US atomic secrecy. A few years later, a Democrat Congress decided Ft. Monmouth was so compromised by Soviet penetration that it had to be shut down.


1954 - The 2 month long Army-McCarthy Hearings were watched by 20 million people on television. McCarthy investigated an Army dentist named Irving Peress who took the 5th amendment 20 times in connection with his affiliation with the Communist Party. In its report on the Peress case, the McClellan Committee said that "some 48 errors of more than minor importance were committed by the Army in connection with the commissioning, transfer, promotion, and honorable discharge of Irving Peress." As a result, the Army made some sweeping changes in its security program, including a policy statement that said "the taking of the Fifth Amendment by an individual queried about his Communist affiliations is sufficient to warrant the issuance of a general discharge rather than an honorable discharge."The Army countercharged on March 11 that Roy Cohn, a McCarthy committee staff member had tried to get extra passes for a former staffer David Schine. The Hearings concluded that McCarthy himself had nothing to do with it, but the committee also concluded that Army Secretary Robert Stevens and Army Counsel John Adams "made efforts to terminate or influence the investigation and hearings at Fort Monmouth," and that Adams "made vigorous and diligent efforts" to block subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board "by means of personal appeal to certain members of the [McCarthy] committee."

The State Department's Owen Lattimore was the man that McCarthy made the most allegations against. McCarthy went so far as to say that he would stake his entire reputation on the question of whether Lattimore was a Communist agent. Now, of course, we have absolute proof that McCarthy was right.

During McCarthy's entire career "1947 to 1958 no American citizen was interrogated without benefit of legal counsel, none was arrested or detained without due judicial process, and no one went to jail without trial." (A. Herman, p 3) The Communist Party was not outlawed and being a member was not a crime.

July 30, 1954, Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing McCarthy of conduct "unbecoming a member of the United States Senate." Flanders two months earlier had told the Senate that McCarthy's "anti-Communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority."

When a special session of the Senate convened on November 8, 1954, these were two charges to be debated and voted on: 1) That Senator McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" in 1952 with the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections that was looking into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with a resolution for his expulsion from the Senate; and 2) That in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Senator McCarthy had "intemperately abused" General Ralph Zwicker. These were both bogus charges. No one has to voluntarily come before a Senate Committee, least of all a Senator. The Zwicker count was dropped at the last moment. Before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 21, 1957, Zwicker's own assessment of his testimony before McCarthy on February 18, 1954, was: "I think there are some circumstances … that would certainly tend to give a person the idea that perhaps I was recalcitrant, perhaps I was holding back, and perhaps I wasn't too cooperative.... I am afraid I was perhaps overcautious and perhaps on the defensive, and that this feeling … may have inclined me to be not as forthright, perhaps, in answering the questions put to me as I might have been otherwise."

Perhaps because the charges were so bogus, perhaps because he wanted publicity, Joe McCarthy avoided several opportunities to dismiss the censure resolution (which was so poorly worded that it didn't even have the word 'censure' in it). He welcomed a vote. It went against him. Although meaningless in itself, it gave the liberal press the excuse to ignore and/or bash McCarthy the rest of his life. In June 1953, McCarthy was a normal Senator with a 35 percent favorable rating and 30 percent unfavorable. In January 1954 he was rated the fourth most admired American with a 50 percent favorable; in March he had 46 favorable, 36 against. Then the liberal media did a hatchet job on him and in August 1954 he had 36 percent favorable and 51 percent unfavorable rating. McCarthy retained about 35 percent favorable ratings throughout the rest of his life.
1957, May 2 - Joseph R. McCarthy died from acute hepatitus.

[B]CONCLUSION

With the opening of the KGB archives and the release of the VENONA intercepts - decoded Soviet KGB and GRU traffic - it has been proved that McCarthy was absolutely right about the extensive Soviet penetration of the U.S. government in all the most sensitive sections and its danger to America. According to the KGB archives the NKVD had 221 agents in the Roosevelt administration in April 1941 and the Soviet military GRU probably had a like number. He was proved right that the Communist Party, U.S.A., was an arm of the Soviet intelligence apparatus and the Soviet Union considered the US as their "main enemy." His liberal critics in academe and the mainstream media, who denied there was Communist subversion and made excuses for it, were proved absolutely wrong! This should have discredited the liberal ideology and those who mouthed it. Because the left had no answer or effective reply to the challenge McCarthy posed, they engaged in personal destruction - they smeared and demonized McCarthy because he was truth.
Joseph McCarthy was the giant of his day. His supporters and associates all went on to the highest success: Roy Cohn became one of the greatest defense lawyers in America; Everett Dirkson went on to have a most distinguished career in the Senate as did Barry Goldwater; Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy went on to become President.
America Was at War for Survival with Total Evil and the Liberals were on the Other Side

Pat Buchanan wrote about the great Joe McCarthy in his book Right From the Beginning: "And yet, today's near universal fear and loathing leaves much unexplained. If McCarthy was so great a menace, if this was a time of national "hysteria," why does not a single Gallup Poll of that era show even 1 percent of Americans viewing McCarthyism or witch-hunting or anti-Communist extremism as a significant national problem?" and later " That half of a nation to which McCarthy appealed as late as 1954 supported him, I believe, not because of precisely what he said, but because of what they understood him to be saying. To the Americans who sustained Joe McCarthy for four years, he was saying that the governing American Establishment, our political elite, was no longer fit to determine the destiny of the United States; it had disqualified itself by having poured down a sewer everything for which twelve million Americans had fought and bled and died at Bataan and Corregidor and Midway, at Anzio and Normandy and Bastogne, and by having delivered up half the world to Joseph Stalin."


Joe McCarthy's great achievement was that he helped popularize a deep public animosity toward Communism and its agents. McCarthy attacked liberalism itself, exposing its fraud by proving liberal's willingness to side with Communist infiltration and treason, to glamorize the brutality of Communist governments. Liberalism sympathizes with and protects Communism's champions and professes to find moral worth in a system of absolute evil. Liberalism and Communism are both infected with the same materialistic secular virus and have such philosophical affinity that usually they can not be distinguished. Their identical world-view creates a "strong affinity between the Communists and New Dealers; between the progressive and totalitarian visions of the maximalist state."
(Professor A. Herman)

In the long lens of history, Joseph R. McCarthy will be considered one of the very greatest Americans because he was a great patriot. He was the American St. George. He fought the dragon.

Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Freedom

"There he came, from the heartland of America, a tenacious and quite ordinary politician; and in a sudden and lasting moment of recognition, he saw the central truth of his age: that his country, his faith, his civilization was at war with communism, war pure and simple. 'This war will not end except in either victory or death for this civilization' he said again and again."(Willi Schlamm)..."And so this fallen warrior, though dead, speaketh, calling a nation of free men to be delivered from the complacency of a false security and from regarding those who loudly sound the trumpets of vigilance and alarm as mere disturbers of the peace."

- Senate Chaplain Rev. Frederick Brown Harris at Senator Joe McCarthy's memorial.

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Great Post.  Great info.  And YES, we DO need another Joe McCarthy.  In fact, we need an entire political party full of Joe McCarthy's.

The villification of McCarthy was truly the first, and biggest, step forward for the communist movement in this country.  That the media villified him then, and every year since, should have tipped-off somebody that the media in America had already been co-opted by the communist mentality -- now it's too late.

Actually, I was thinking we really need another Charlie McCarthy.  Now, he was funny!