It’s like finding out you’ve been cheated by everyone you
know. And they have all been lying about it for a long time. The deceit and
dissembling required to maintain the devious conspiracy becomes an ersatz
reality comprised of lies. Even when the truth is revealed, the effort of the
conspirators carries a potent influence. It’s hard for others to accept that it
happened. Even after full disclosure, the attraction to the intricacy of the
deception lingers. The truth may be finally free, but it flies hesitantly.
This is how it happened with the saga of Senator Joseph
McCarthy, besides Hitler and
Stalin the most maligned figure in the modern era, a
veritable Beelzebub everyone loves to hate. To discover that McCarthy was the
victim of a massive campaign to discredit him, rather than the other way round,
takes some time to absorb. But it turns out McCarthy didn’t ruin lives – it was
his life that was destroyed by a big lie designed to protect a cadre of
despicable traitors unprecedented in US history. Everyone seemed to agree that
McCarthy was “tearing the nation apart” with his false accusations that
departments of government - even the US Army - were infiltrated with Soviet
Communist agents. The nation was indeed torn apart, but not by McCarthy. It was
the ideological forces against him who won the day, and wrested control of the
future political debate that still divides the country.
From the 1950s to today, political and intellectual
conspirators have made hating McCarthy a national pastime. Young people don’t
know who Winston Churchill is, but they can orate confidently on McCarthyism.
It’s a hell’uva an achievement when you think about it. Not only has the
radical Left destroyed learning in the process, they’ve deleted the accepted
facts of Western history and replaced it with political sociology of their own
making.
In this environment – the prevailing one in education today
– Thomas Jefferson and the “founders” are racist white male pigs, but the
Communists who spied on America right under our collective nose - working in
our own government on behalf of the Soviet Union - are well-meaning heroes.
Some have even been beatified as martyrs, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
and Alger Hiss. These so-called “innocents” are praised in today’s culture as
heroes, victims of a fascist, imperialist America. Genuine achievers are
consequently maligned by the revisionist historians as enemies of the people.
The Wheel Of History
Turns
In 1995, the NSA and CIA turned the wheel of history toward
the truth by declassifying the Venona files, intercepted messages from Moscow
to their American agents from 1942 until 1964. And lo and behold there they
are: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lachlan Currie
and hundreds of other American Soviet agents working for the US government –
code names and all. Not only were these alleged victims guilty, they and their
apologists made fools of us all. Yet, what followed in the national press after
Venona was resounding silence.
After Venona sank in, despite violent opposition by the
usual suspects, some of the more rational members of the intellectual Left -
such as the venerated historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. – opined that McCarthy may
have been right after all, but he was a bad person and he did great harm to
innocent people. Then it was back to the same shopworn clichés, such as
“McCarthy didn’t uncover one communist”. Actually, according to Venona, he was
way short in his estimations, but the anti-McCarthy propaganda machinery
churned on to be sure history goes their way. Recently, George Clooney’s nifty
propaganda stunt in the film Good Night and Good Luck was an example of the
conspiracy to continue to malign McCarthy in the light of Venona, allowing the
smug anti-McCarthy fellow travelers to sweep the facts under the rug and move
on in their obsessive manipulations to protect their own.
Final Verdict
And that’s where things stood until November 2007 with the
publication of Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Joe McCarthy And His
Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans, columnist, editor and
former director of the National Journalism Center in Washington, DC. Drawing on
previously classified FBI and governmental files - and new information
available from Venona - Evans upends the McCarthy myth and turns the tables on
the real guilty parties: Presidents Truman and Eisenhower; a majority of
Congress; heads of several government agencies; lawyer Joseph Welch (who hurled
the famous words at McCarthy: “have you no shame”); and media icons from the
1950s and 60s, including Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. Even Ben Bradlee - who
went on to fame as the editor who fanned the flames of Watergate - is not
spared by the facts uncovered by Evans.
The panorama of the McCarthy Era comes to life in the book,
as does the dirty deeds by those who betrayed the public trust by maligning
McCarthy to cloak the massive penetration of the US government by the Soviets
via their American operatives. While Venona proved that “McCarthy was right”,
Blacklisted By History demonstrates in exact detail that his enemies - our
enemies it turns out - created a false portrait of McCarthy that continues
today with passionate participation from newly minted detractors.
Evans and his book serve as existential locks in the canal
to truth. First comes nausea, followed by anger when the awful reality sinks
in. The American political dialogue from the mid-20th century has been
dominated by the events of the McCarthy Era. The continuing anti-American
harangue that continues to serve as the platform of the Left was born and
nurtured in the campaign against McCarthy. The manipulation of US China policy
in the 1930s and 40s by the Soviet-influenced American operatives – resulting
in the victory of communism and the genocides of Mao – was applied to US
efforts to stem the Red tide in Vietnam, resulting in defeat due to political
manipulation on the home front by the very same ideologists. The torrent of
hate directed against President George Bush over the war in Iraq sprang from
the same well, waiting and warming in the oven of the McCarthy Era.
It is sad to realize that none of this would have happened,
thus sparing us the past 50+ years of political distortion, if government
intelligence agencies had released the Venona transcripts during the string of
congressional hearings investigating the infiltration of Soviet-American agents
in nearly all US government agencies during the McCarthy Era. If the evidence
was made available, McCarthy would be a hero rather than a pariah “blacklisted
by history. Instead, as is usually the case, history was manipulated and public
policy stained due to the intelligence community’s obsessive desire to keep
their secrets – no matter the consequence to the well-being of the nation.