Demagogue by Larry Tye

Author:Larry Tye
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781328960023
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Alarm about the dynamic between the battle-scarred senator and the neophyte president also was spreading abroad. “In his attitude toward the G.P.U. Senator, courageous General Eisenhower appears to be downright cowardly,” commented the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the usually sympathetic Austrian paper, likening McCarthy to the Soviet secret police. “Your president must speak up,” a British letter writer echoed in the Washington Post. Meanwhile in Moscow, Pravda asserted that the US president “on the whole supported McCarthy,” whom it branded a “briber, speculator and defrauder.” Eisenhower’s appeasement wasn’t surprising, the Communist Party organ added, because “owners of American monopolies” who steered the Republican Party had always seen McCarthy as a useful weapon to grab power and batter liberals.

What could and should this president—the second in a row to be held captive by the bully from Wisconsin—have done differently?

He ought to have ordered his FBI to plug its leaks to McCarthy, the State Department to stop cowering and backpedaling, and the International Information Agency not to “deshelve” its overseas libraries. Instead, said Martin Merson, who watched it all from a senior perch at the Information Agency, “the President made the mistake in those early days of not believing enough in the people, of feeling that he had to accommodate himself to the so-called practical politicians, to make compromises, to heed the cry of expediency.” But whereas Merson at least listened to the president’s justifications, McCarthy target James Wechsler offered this harsher verdict: McCarthy “was not superman; he was nourished more by the weakness of those who should have resolutely challenged him—most notably Dwight D. Eisenhower—than by any mysterious resources. There must have been many moments when he shook with laughter over the conduct of those he was harassing; surely he must have enjoyed Mr. Eisenhower’s austere refusal to ‘indulge in personalities,’ the craven formula devised early at the White House for the preservation of internal Republican peace and quiet.”

Ike made another major error in trusting a middleman to broker his relations with the senator, and he compounded that misjudgment by sending his vice president. Richard Nixon was a Red-baiter himself, at least as sympathetic to McCarthy as he was to his boss the president. Even more problematic was Nixon’s own overweening political ambition, which was one reason why Joe never trusted him. When the president dispatched Nixon to persuade McCarthy not to assault the Republican White House the way he had Truman’s, the vice president was careful not to offend the senator or his legions of followers. Likewise, rather than pushing Ike to stand up for the Constitution or McCarthy’s victims, the vice president reinforced the president’s instinct to pacify. “Nixon’s role in the McCarthy era was pragmatic and cynical and unprincipled,” says his biographer John A. Farrell. “Nixon above all saw the Commie-bashing issue as an effective one for himself and Republicans and tried with all his might to keep McCarthy from alienating Ike—but only for fear of losing this trademark issue. If there was anyone outside Ike’s own circle who encouraged the caution that led to the Let Him Die By His Own Hand reaction it was probably Nixon.

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