Tag Archives: Joseph McCarthy

Avoiding McCarthy

Eric Rubin, president of the American Foreign Service Association, reflected on the impact of the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1940’s and 50’s on U.S. diplomats. (“Foreign Service Duty,” The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020)

During those beginning years of the Cold War, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy led an investigation with unsubstantiated claims into supposed Communist infiltration of the State Department. McCarthy was later censored by the Senate. However, ruined careers from the hearings caused American diplomats to be cautious about their reporting and advice, not wanting to be tarred with accusations of being “soft” on communism and seeing their careers ruined.

Rubin quotes from Theodore White’s book In Search of History: Junior diplomats now “knew that prediction of a Communist victory would be equated with hope for a Communist victory. They learned to temper their dispatches of observation in the field with what their political superiors wished to hear.”

Thus, Americans may not have been warned of the dangers of the later Vietnam quagmire as they should have.

The example is a call, Rubin said, “to stay true to our mission and to tell it like is, in service to our country and to our fellow citizens.”

To do so may indeed require courage, even as the politicization of higher State Department offices and other departments of the government have increased in the last few years.

Poisoned Partisan Politics: We’ve Survived It Before

It may encourage us to know that the United States has survived other periods of bitter partisan divides. I recently read an article chronicling the battles between the president and Congress during the late 1940’s and early 50’s. (“When Congress Gets Mad,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2016.)

I had thought of the bloodletting between the two major parties in this current era as the worst since the Civil War. In contrast, I pictured the years of the Cold War and our conflicts with the Soviet Union as one of cooperation between all Americans, all united against Communism. It was actually a bitter period.

The race between Democrats and Republicans in 1948 was extremely close. The sitting president, Harry S. Truman won, but Republicans bitterly criticized his foreign policy, saying he wasn’t tough enough on Communists.

He had lost China and given a green light to North Korea to invade South Korea, they said. One senator claimed that the blood of “our boys in Korea” should be directly placed on the shoulders of Truman’s secretary of state. “Contemptible,” Truman responded.

It was the era when Senator Joseph McCarthy used the public’s fear of Communism to begin witch hunts that ruined careers of innocent citizens.

Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won the next election against Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He continued many of Truman’s policies and began an era of constructive relationships with Democrats.

McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954. McCarthyism became a synonym for a campaign of unfounded accusations.