Joe McCarthy was Not a Model Conservative
Nicholas Mosvick published an interesting essay in Fusion reassessing the legacy of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and the anticommunist movement more broadly. While McCarthy’s efforts to unveil the genuine threat of communism and the Soviet Union ought to be appreciated by any American conservative, Mosvick unfortunately goes too far in his defense of the period’s populist style. Even at the time, leaders within the conservative movement had plenty of doubts about “Tail-Gunner Joe” and his politics of fear. There are better anticommunists to admire and promote today.
Strangely, Mosvick does not cite the most important conservative anticommunist of the twentieth century: Whittaker Chambers. Originally a revolutionary who joined the Soviet underground to commit acts of espionage against the United States, Chambers became disillusioned with the USSR as it committed acts of increasingly horrific mass-murder and allied with Nazi Germany to partition Poland. He turned informer and became a cause célèbre among postwar conservatives. Chambers dedicated much of his life to exposing the full extent to which communists had infiltrated the American government. His 1952 memoir Witness—one of the greatest American autobiographies—became a rallying cry for anticommunists across the country.
Nevertheless, Chambers rejected McCarthy and all his works. In his biography of Chambers, Sam Tanenhaus recounts that, when the two men met in 1950, the writer initially supported McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade. By 1952, however, Chambers grew wary of McCarthy’s populism. While he supported investigations of communist infiltration of the government and academia, he became convinced that McCarthy was being altogether too reckless. Rather than addressing the real security concerns Chambers and his ex-communist allies earnestly raised, McCarthy used his congressional perch to chase popularity and votes.
Chambers even worried that McCarthyism would undermine a legitimate anticommunist movement in the United States. In a letter to his young admirer William F. Buckley, Jr., explaining why he could not endorse his book defending the Wisconsinite, Chambers warned that McCarthy’s style of demagoguery spelled doom for a sensible right-wing politics. “His flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objectivity for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble,” he wrote. “Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.”
Read more in Fusion.
