Senator Joe McCarthy Anti-Communist |
For meritorious and efficient performance of duty as an observer and rear gunner of a dive bomber attached to a Marine scout bombing squadron operating in the Solomon Islands area from September 1 to December 31, 1943. He participated in a large number of combat missions, and in addition to his regular duties, acted as aerial photographer. He obtained excellent photographs of enemy gun positions, despite intense anti-aircraft fire, thereby gaining valuable information which contributed materially to the success of subsequent strikes in the area. Although suffering from a severe leg injury, he refused to be hospitalized and continued to carry out his duties as Intelligence Officer in a highly efficient manner. His courageous devotion to duty was in keeping with the highest traditions of the naval service.
When a special session of the Senate convened on November 8, 1954, these were two charges to be debated and voted on: 1) That Senator McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" in 1952 with the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections that was looking into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with a resolution for his expulsion from the Senate; and 2) That in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Senator McCarthy had "intemperately abused" General Ralph Zwicker. These were both bogus charges. No one has to voluntarily come before a Senate Committee, least of all a Senator. The Zwicker count was dropped at the last moment. Before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 21, 1957, Zwicker's own assessment of his testimony before McCarthy on February 18, 1954, was: "I think there are some circumstances that would certainly tend to give a person the idea that perhaps I was recalcitrant, perhaps I was holding back, and perhaps I wasn't too cooperative.... I am afraid I was perhaps overcautious and perhaps on the defensive, and that this feeling may have inclined me to be not as forthright, perhaps, in answering the questions put to me as I might have been otherwise."
Perhaps because the charges were so bogus, perhaps because he wanted publicity, Joe McCarthy avoided several opportunities to dismiss the censure resolution (which was so poorly worded that it didn't even have the word 'censure' in it). He welcomed a vote. It went against him. Although meaningless in itself, it gave the liberal press the excuse to ignore and/or bash McCarthy the rest of his life. In June 1953, McCarthy was a normal Senator with a 35 percent favorable rating and 30 percent unfavorable. In January 1954 he was rated the fourth most admired American with a 50 percent favorable; in March he had 46 favorable, 36 against. Then the liberal media did a hatchet job on him and in August 1954 he had 36 percent favorable and 51 percent unfavorable rating. McCarthy retained about 35 percent favorable ratings throughout the rest of his life.
With the opening of the KGB archives and the release of the VENONA intercepts - decoded Soviet KGB and GRU traffic - it has been proved that McCarthy was absolutely right about the extensive Soviet penetration of the U.S. government in all the most sensitive sections and its danger to America. According to the KGB archives the NKVD had 221 agents in the Roosevelt administration in April 1941 and the Soviet military GRU probably had a like number. He was proved right that the Communist Party, U.S.A., was an arm of the Soviet intelligence apparatus and the Soviet Union considered the US as their "main enemy." His liberal critics in academe and the mainstream media, who denied there was Communist subversion and made excuses for it, were proved absolutely wrong! This should have discredited the liberal ideology and those who mouthed it. Because the left had no answer or effective reply to the challenge McCarthy posed, they engaged in personal destruction - they smeared and demonized McCarthy because he was truth. |
Pat Buchanan wrote about the great Joe McCarthy in his book Right From the Beginning: "And yet, today's near universal fear and loathing leaves much unexplained. If McCarthy was so great a menace, if this was a time of national "hysteria," why does not a single Gallup Poll of that era show even 1 percent of Americans viewing McCarthyism or witch-hunting or anti-Communist extremism as a significant national problem?" and later " That half of a nation to which McCarthy appealed as late as 1954 supported him, I believe, not because of precisely what he said, but because of what they understood him to be saying. To the Americans who sustained Joe McCarthy for four years, he was saying that the governing American Establishment, our political elite, was no longer fit to determine the destiny of the United States; it had disqualified itself by having poured down a sewer everything for which twelve million Americans had fought and bled and died at Bataan and Corregidor and Midway, at Anzio and Normandy and Bastogne, and by having delivered up half the world to Joseph Stalin."
Joe McCarthy's great achievement was that he helped popularize a deep public animosity toward Communism and its agents. McCarthy attacked liberalism itself, exposing its fraud by proving liberal's willingness to side with Communist infiltration and treason, to glamorize the brutality of Communist governments. Liberalism sympathizes with and protects Communism's champions and professes to find moral worth in a system of absolute evil. Liberalism and Communism are both infected with the same materialistic secular virus and have such philosophical affinity that usually they can not be distinguished. Their identical world-view creates a "strong affinity between the Communists and New Dealers; between the progressive and totalitarian visions of the maximalist state." (Professor A. Herman)
In the long lens of history, Joseph R. McCarthy will be considered one of the very greatest Americans because he was a great patriot. He was the American St. George. He fought the dragon.
"There he came, from the heartland of America, a tenacious and quite ordinary politician; and in a sudden and lasting moment of recognition, he saw the central truth of his age: that his country, his faith, his civilization was at war with communism, war pure and simple. 'This war will not end except in either victory or death for this civilization' he said again and again."(Willi Schlamm)..."And so this fallen warrior, though dead, speaketh, calling a nation of free men to be delivered from the complacency of a false security and from regarding those who loudly sound the trumpets of vigilance and alarm as mere disturbers of the peace."
- Senate Chaplain Rev. Frederick Brown Harris at Senator Joe McCarthy's memorial.
The definitive book on McCarthy is The Life and Times of Joseph McCarthy, Professor Thomas C. Reeves, 1997.
Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator By Arthur Herman, NY:Free Press, 1999
See McCarthy in his own words: America's Retreat From Victory, The Story of George C. Marshall
https://members.tripod.com/~wwx2/mccarthy.html =Joseph McCarthy
Email: pha1941@hotmail.com