Wednesday, January 05, 2005

 
Classic Chambers on Joseph McCarthy

From "A CONSPIRACY SO IMMENSE The World Of Joe McCarthy" by David M. Oshinsky pages 308-309:
"There were, however, a few conservative intellectuals who diliked and distrusted McCarthy but refused to say so in public. Foremost among them was Whittaker Chambers, the most prominent, and believable , ex-Communist witness of that era. Chambers viewed McCarthy as a living breathing disaster - crude, self-seeking and often dishonest. He "is a bore," Chambers told a friend,
"for the same reason that Rocky Marciano...is a bore to people who are not exclusively interested in fist throwing. The senator is not, like Truman, a swift jabber who does his dirty work with a glee that is infectiously impish; nor, like F. D. Roosevelt, an artful and experienced ringmaster whose techniques may be studied again and again and again...The senator...is a heavy-handed slugger who telegraphs his fouls in advance. What is worse, he had to learn from consequences or counselors that he has fouled. I know he thinks this is a superior that the rest of us are too far behind to appreciate.(25)"
What worried Chambers were the likely consequences of such behavior. In a letter to William Buckley, he portrayed the senator as an enormously self-destructive man, quite capable of dragging down those rallied to his side. "None of us are his enemies," Chambers explained.
"...But all of us, to one degree or another, have slowly come to question his judgment adn to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objective for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble. Inf fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder whicb will play into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come."
The letter was written early in 1954 - at the height of McCarthy's popularity...."

Oshinky, whose book is not entirely unsympathetic to McCarthy, quoted Chambers from WFB Jr.'s *Odyssey of a Friend," of which I have not a copy. Chambers was something of a gloomy Gus(though not a Comrade Hall)who famously feared that he had gone over from the winning to the losing side, quoted someone without disagreement: "There is only one truth - if you push a man hard enough, he will die. That is all," and. of course penned, "...we can hope to little more than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots..." Joseph McCarthy died of alcoholism and in disgrace, bringing to mind Chambers citation of a revolutionist's "rule" that "It is not enough to kill an adversary. He must first be dishonored." Those longing for a less depressing account of McCarthy and a make-your-blood-boil picture of his enemies might do well to read Ann Coulter's *Treason*. (I've done little more than crack the index pages of Buckley's "McCarthy and His Enemies.")