On Sunday morning Donald Trump decided to go after Robert Mueller (again), this time by telling Americans that they ought to brush up on their Cold War history:
Study the late Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged Witch Hunt!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2018
This is an . . . interesting analogy for the president to make, for reasons we’ll get to in a minute. But let’s start with a simpler question, because it’s one conservatives used to care a lot about: Did Joe McCarthy spend his career pursuing a “rigged witch hunt”?
Conservatives fought about this subject with the left for almost 50 years and it’s one of the arguments that we now know the conservatives got right.
There is a lot to criticize about McCarthy’s tenure in the Senate and, specifically, his anti-Communist crusading in the Tydings Committee and Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and during the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy was a loudmouth and a drunk who was drawn to microphones and cameras the way flies are to manure. He was incautious and irresponsible and you can make the case, as Bill Bennett once did, that in the end “McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-communism.”
As McCarthy’s biographer Arthur Herman wrote, “Those who knew McCarthy were constantly discovering to their astonishment how little McCarthy knew about theory or practice of Communism itself.” More: “When cornered or challenged, he preferred to exaggerate—even lie—about what cards he actually had in his hand. During his short and meteoric career as the Senate’s leading red-baiter, McCarthy learned to bluff his way through in hopes that subsequent research would confirm the bulk of it.”
But was McCarthy wrong? Which is to say, was he hunting make-believe witches? No.
Sometimes it seems as though everyone in America thinks that history began in 2008. It did not. If you have not read Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, you should. And if you won’t, then at least read this essay from the late Eric Breindel about Chambers. In short, Chambers spent most of his adult life in the Communist underground here in America, using assumed names, answering to Russian superiors, making contacts, and stealing government secrets. He wasn’t alone: The U.S. government really was filled with an extraordinary number of native-born Americans who decided, for one reason or another, to spy for the Soviet Union.
Alger Hiss is the most famous of these and McCarthy played a tertiary role in helping Chambers bring that man’s story to light. (The Hiss hearings took place before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which, despite the popular misconception, was not McCarthy’s bailiwick.) Hiss was a high-ranking State Department official, a liberal darling, and a Communist spy. He denied the charges against him and he and the rest of the liberal intelligentsia spent 45 years insisting that the case against him was nothing more than a witch hunt.
They were lying. We know this because of the Venona Project, a series of decrypted cables between the spies in America and their masters in the USSR, which were released beginning in 1995. Breindel wrote a book about them. The takeaway, per Robert Novak—nobody’s cuck— was that “Soviet intelligence agencies had penetrated deep into the U.S. government for purposes of espionage.”
But it gets better: The Venona decryptions were such a closely held secret by the Army that even President Truman was kept in the dark about that. As a result, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan later concluded that “It gives one pause now that all Truman ever ‘learned’ about Communist espionage came from the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the speeches of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, and the like.”
Moynihan was not the only liberal to be convinced that McCarthy had made a valuable contribution to American life because he was on to something. Here’s liberal columnist Nicholas von Hoffman in 1996:
So now liberals must face the question:
Was Joe McCarthy right? Could all the defiant politicians, the martyrs to civil liberties, the blacklisted teachers and entertainers, the earnest professors and sincere foundation executives have been wrong? The answer is, no and yes. . . .
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 Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught.
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. . . .
McCarthy, as his subsequent history would show, knew little about communism, on this side of the ocean or the other. This loutish, duplicitous bully, who carried, not the names of Reds but bottles of hootch in his briefcase died in disgrace and of alcoholism. Yet, in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. He just didn’t know their names.
Now maybe you’re on the #MAGA train and don’t want to take a liberal’s word for it. So listen to Ann Coulter, who has defended McCarthy on much the same grounds, both in her book Treason and elsewhere:
The true story of Joe McCarthy, told in meticulous, irrefutable detail in Blacklisted by History, is that from 1938 to 1946, the Democratic Party acquiesced in a monstrous conspiracy being run through the State Department, the military establishment, and even the White House to advance the Soviet cause within the U.S. government.
In the face of the Democrats’ absolute refusal to admit to their fecklessness, fatuity and recklessness in allowing known Soviet spies to penetrate the deepest levels of government, McCarthy demanded an accounting.
If the Mueller probe is analogous to McCarthyism, then Trump is guilty as sin.
On the one hand, it’s tempting to write off this entire exercise as just another example of our president’s historical illiteracy. Seriously: Raise your hand if you think he knows the difference between Joe and Gene McCarthy.
But on the other hand, there’s a wonderful bit of irony at play because the single best and most honest argument made for Trumpism to date has come from Claremont’s William Voegeli. Back in 2016, Voegeli had this to say in defense of Donald Trump:
“I think it is often the case in American political history that worthy causes have unworthy champions. Anticommunism and Joseph McCarthy would be at the top of that list.”
