“Senator, may we not drop this?! We know he belonged to the Lawyer’s Guild… Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
– Army secretary Joseph Welch to Senator Joe McCarthy, June 1954
Legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow did a program called “This I Believe” on the CBS Radio Network starting the year I was born, in the heart of the Baby Boom. The show featured people from all walks of life- humble and famous- to narrate essays about what made them tick. They explained what motivated them in their daily existence. It was a secular, rather than religious thing, and it reflected the bold new Atomic age with America in the vanguard of just about everything.
The show was wildly popular, although the Korean War caused a minor crisis of confidence, and then the Age of Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy made a lot of people believe that there were commies under every bed.
The ultimate rejection of McCarthyism was based on fundamental decency- the quote that starts this musing is the one everybody remembers today. McCarthy accused the Army of being riddled with comsymps and the Army in turn accused chief committee counsel Roy Cohn of pressuring the service to give preferential treatment to a draftee named David Schine, who may have been Cohn’s lover. The hearings had everything, and appeared to blend political and sexual preferences together in a thoroughly salacious manner.
The whole thing was broadcast gavel-to-gavel, a first, and left everyone so sickened that McCarthy was censured by the Senate for his conduct when it was all over. His star waned, but there were some clear lines in the sand drawn between the ideologues on the further ends of the spectrum that I believe presaged the partisan lunacy of today.
The supporters of some of the people smeared by McCarthy- notably State Department diplomat Alger Hiss- made the vilified the poster children for their unjust persecution, and ensured that Tailgunner Joe’s name became synonymous with fuzzy-headed and ill-informed extremism.
There is a lot more to the whole thing, but some people had to bite their tongues for decades. As it turned out, there actually were Commies under at least some of the beds in Washington, and some of them were actually sleeping on top. It was not until the VENONA intercepts of Soviet diplomatic cables were released that it became evident that Hiss was actually a Soviet Agent, along with others.
The fact that McCarthy had been at least partially correct (egged on by Cohn, who as a prosecutor in the trial of Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg must have been aware of highly classified information that conclusively proved their guilt) hasn’t changed anyone’s belief system. Hiss still has his apologists, and I heard a radio show the other day arguing something or other about the fact that the Rosenbergs were done an injustice.
Maybe that is true. I don’t know what to believe about that, any more than I know what to believe about who killed JFK. The murder of the President is bad enough. The fact that we do not know why or by whom is still baffling, and having to plow through the events again, all the reconstructions and conjectures, the red herrings, hallucinations and active hoaxes makes me a little crazy.
I won’t tell you what I actually believe about it, except it is very curious that the same cast of characters appear to be involved with plots in Dallas and later in Washington. I am not going to accuse anyone of anything. It would be absurd to contend that the government of the United States was subject to a coup d’etat in Dallas, wouldn’t it?
I suppose it could be a coincidence, all those crazy Cubans showing up again. It would be pretty crazy to try to link the mob and some rogue factions of the CIA together in some astonishing, long-running conspiracies to kill heads of state all around the world, practise mind control on your own people, open the mail and tap the phones without warrant.
Must have have been coincidence. After all, Gerald Ford was one of the members of the Warren Commission, and one of the first things he did as President, after the pardon of Richard Nixon and Sy Hersh’s publication of the summary of the CIA Family Jewels, was to ask Nelson Rockefeller to conduct a Blue Ribbon Panel to clear up any misunderstandings about what the Community had been up to.
The President believed that would take care of things.
It didn’t, as it turned out, but you can’t say he did not give it a try.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com