Roy Cohn, Clay Risen writes in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, was the “distillation of everything” that right-wing Republicans “loved about McCarthy,” including “his vindictiveness [and] his willingness to lie.” Except that he was a lot more disciplined than his “slovenly” boss, becoming “the chief executive of McCarthyism, Inc.” Risen is an established journalist (and onetime editor at this journal) whose current beat is on the obit desk at The New York Times—a role demanding a gift for brief but deft character sketches that is much in evidence in Red Scare. He is also a prolific historian who has published well-received books about Teddy Roosevelt, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the King assassination. His latest effort, written in the shadow of Trump’s first term in the White House, came out in the opening weeks of the second Trump term, following a reelection campaign in which the once and future President promised to root out the “Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS, who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.” Considered purely from a marketing perspective, that’s exquisitely good timing. While the parallels between the McCarthy and Trump eras are not exact (for one thing, Joe McCarthy was never elected President), Red Scare reminds us of where our ingrained national propensity for bouts of public hysteria and official intolerance may lead yet again.
Terms such as “McCarthyism” or “the McCarthy era” are of course, largely misnomers. McCarthy played a minor role in the first half-decade of the post-World War II Red Scare, emerging as its public face only in February 1950, when he claimed in a speech to a Republican women’s gathering in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had a list of 205 Communists then currently employed by the State Department. The sensational nature of the accusation, and the populist resentment it drew upon and fanned, made the heretofore obscure senator from Wisconsin a national celebrity. “It has not been the less fortunate…who have been selling this nation out,” McCarthy declared that evening in Wheeling, “but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer…the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give.” Wielding the investigative powers of the Senate, McCarthy went on to blacken the reputations of victims ranging from obscure academics to celebrated generals. What he failed to do, in a four-year political rampage that made him a dominant figure in the Republican Party, was uncover the presence of a single actual Soviet agent in the American government.