Only a wordsmith of William F. Buckley’s caliber could try, and largely succeed, in depicting Joe McCarthy as an engaging, sympathetic, and ultimately tragic figure. Buckley’s McCarthy is a rogue — but not a loathsome enemy of freedom so detestable that the very word “McCarthyism” is a name accepted even by conservative politicians for unjust, unfounded accusations.
Make no mistake. Buckley’s new book is not a comprehensive analysis of Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy. The Redhunter is truly a novel, the thirteenth by the doyen of conservative pundits who has honed his craft well in chronicling the fictional adventures of his CIA operative, Blackford Oakes. Even liberals who grow faint at the thought of any kind word about McCarthy will enjoy the pacing and suspense of an engrossing story with many twists and turns.
Act One of Buckley’s drama portrays how young Joe, manifesting grit and a cavalier disregard for the truth, started as a fifteen-year-old high school dropout and failed chicken farmer and ended as the youngest member of the U.S. Senate, elected in 1946 at thirty-eight.
In Act Two, McCarthy stumbles into his role as America’s most famous Communist-hunter and inspiration to millions of his countrymen. No, he did not catch any real spies, but neither did he ruin the lives of innocent Americans. Buckley forthrightly describes the essence of “McCarthyism” when he deals with State Department adviser Owen Lattimore, immortalized as one of the senator’s “victims.” McCarthy accurately identified Lattimore as one of the influential insiders whose pro-Communist views adversely influenced U.S. Cold War strategy; McCarthy went overboard only by designating Lattimore as the top Soviet agent in America.
Act Three opens with the appearance of Roy Cohn as the McCarthy committee’s chief counsel. Hired at the suggestion of Hearst columnist George Sokolsky to assuage unfounded charges of anti-Semitism by the senator, Cohn — at least in Buckley’s presentation — is a mean-spirited fool who propels McCarthy into a fatal confrontation with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Joe’s doom comes when the president, in the novel, declares, “This is it. The end of Ike’s sweet temper. Son of a bitch.” Condemned by the Senate and ruined politically, a brokenhearted, hopelessly alcoholic McCarthy dies at age forty-eight.
Eisenhower is part of a procession of real people with cameo roles: Harry Truman, Henry Wallace, Dean Acheson, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon, to name only a few. But as in the historical novels of Buckley’s bete noire, Gore Vidal, the real characters appear on the page primarily to interact with the fictional characters.
The Redhunter’s fictional protagonist is idealistic young McCarthy aide Harry Bontecou (an unusual name that I previously had seen only in a footnote in Buckley’s 1954 defense of the senator, McCarthy and His Enemies, citing a book by one Eleanor Bontecou). Harry seems to be roughly modeled on Buckley in both friendship with and criticism of McCarthy, though Buckley never actually worked for McCarthy and, as far as I know, did not experience Bontecou’s romantic difficulties. Bontecou’s conservative mentor, Willmoore Sherrill of Columbia University, can only be Buckley’s conservative mentor, the late Willmoore Kendall of Yale.
In his own historical novel Freedom, William Safire provided a list of which events he had borrowed from history and which events he had made up. Buckley only asserts that “most events here recorded are true to life.” But that does not mean they should be taken literally.
Some accounts in the book which seem most fictional are in fact taken from life — as when freelance writer Forest Davis encounters McCarthy at a Washington party and, impelled by too much liquor, hands over to the senator a 169-page critical manuscript about General George C. Marshall’s foreign policy blunders. A grateful McCarthy puts the entire manuscript, verbatim but unattributed, in the Senate record, then typically adds a characteristically, unsubstantiated accusation that the general is part of “a conspiracy of infamy.”
But many incidents in the novel are invented. Buckley tells a gripping story of how McCarthy’s staff in 1950 leaked information to Meet the Press moderator Lawrence Spivak in preparation for Owen Lattimore’s appearance on the Sunday evening television program. Truman, Acheson, and McCarthy are all described eagerly awaiting the broadcast. Spivak destroys Lattimore with evidence of his denied State Department roles and connection with Soviet spy Lauchlin Currie. “God almighty,” says Acheson, as he watches the program. But in truth, Lattimore never appeared on Meet the Press. His embarrassment came later, before a Senate committee.
Truth-adjustment may be necessary for dramatic tension, but other diversions from reality seem gratuitous. Why have McCarthy addressing a Madison Square Garden rally to attack the Watkins Committee (which recommended his censure) as an “unwitting hand-maiden” of the Communist conspiracy, when in fact he made that attack many weeks earlier in a Senate speech? Why have Wendell Willkie assailing McCarthy in 1954 when in fact the 1940 Republican nominee died ten years earlier?
What will bother liberal critics about The Redhunter is not the anachronisms but the dread that somehow Joe McCarthy is being “rehabilitated.” The publication of the Venona decoding of Soviet communications makes clear that McCarthy, apart from his regrettable hyperbole, was correct in connecting Communist agents and sympathizers with egregious blunders in American national security policy after World War II.
But it is, in fact, far too late for rehabilitation, and novelist Buckley does not attempt it. Rather, he puts this melancholy appraisal in the mouth of Harry Bontecou: “It was one of Joe McCarthy’s ironic legacies that it became almost impossible in future years to say that anyone was a Communist, because you’d be hauled up for committing McCarthyism.” In the novel, his wife Jean tells McCarthy: “It’s slipping away, and that’s not just because there are liberals and Commie sympathizers after you. It’s because your judgment is bad, and it’s affected by booze.”
A final word is given to Whittaker Chambers, who always took a much harsher view of McCarthy than his friend Bill Buckley. In a letter to Harry Bontecou as McCarthy was falling, Chambers writes: “I think it would be a mistake to perpetuate a myth of McCarthy as something he was not. For the Left will have no trouble in shredding a myth which does not stand on reality.” This is not fiction, but from a letter from Chambers to Buckley, who discovered it only recently.
But if the Right refrained from trying to make McCarthy a hero of mythic proportions, the Left felt no such hesitation and turned the senator into an ogre of Hitlerian dimensions. William F. Buckley’s latest novel, The Redhunter, does succeed a little in shredding that liberal contrivance.
Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a CNN commentator.
