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terns," they loftily chide, which is like saying Hitler was a careless
historiographer when he accepted as authentic the Protocols of Zion.
"As regards his imputation of treasonable motives to Marshall, Mc–
Carthy deserves to be criticized. . . . McCarthy's judgment here was
bad." As
if
the essence of the Senator's method was not the attribution
of disloyalty to his opponents! As if, like Hitler and the Communists, it
were not a matter both of neurotic compulsion and of demagogic expe–
diency always to smear his opponents as not just mistaken or stupid but
as wicked, conspiratorial, traitorous! And as if such tactics were not
largely responsible for McCarthy's success in getting headlines!
If
he
had confined himself to the truth about Owen Lattimore, which is that,
as the sober and painstaking reports of the McCarran Committee copi–
ously document, Lattimore was a devious and energetic pro-Communist
propagandist-if he had stuck to that, instead of charging (without
ever adducing any evidence) that Lattimore was "the No. 1 Soviet
espionage agent in this country," how many headlines would that par–
ticular gambit have reaped? Throughout their book, the authors are
constantly admonishing their client-not their hero, for, as Richard
Rovere has shrewdly pointed out, they obviously regard McCarthy with
considerable distaste, personally that is, as against politically-to stick
more closely to the facts (the chariot race in
Ben Hur
could take place
in the space between McCarthy and any given fact), not to impugn
people's loyalty without proof, and in general to behave in a slightly
more civilized manner. There is something very droll in the spectacle
of these two young doctrinaires teaching an old pro how to get ahead.
As for the delicate matter of McCarthy's lies, the authors grimly
admit no less than 34 instances of what they call "inaccuracies," "ex–
aggerations," or "misstatements," ranging from such big lies as his
famous "57 card-carrying Communists in the State Department" to
such peccadilloes (for McCarthy) as his smearing Drew Pearson as a
Communist agent.
1
It is to the authors' credit that they admit so many
lies, but it would be more so if they called them that and if they showed
any indignation or even concern about them. In fact, their tactic vis-a–
vis McCarthy's wholesale lying reminds me ironically of the method de–
veloped by the liberal weeklies in the '30s for dealing with the seamier
1 The count would be doubled if we include the 38 (out of a total of 81)
cases of alleged security risks in the State Department in which the authon
admit, on page 60, that their client was "guilty of exaggeration." And there
are, of course, many, many other lies McCarthy has told to date which either
occurred outside the rather narrow scope of this book or else are not admitted
to have been lies by the authors. For the curious, or the skeptical, the 34 lies
mentioned are described on the following pages: 51, 52, 58, 60, 65, 79, 80 (2),
81, 89 (2), 90 (2), 101, 109, 117, 118, 127, 130, 153, 209, 276 (2), 277,
291, 295, 296, 297 (2), 298 (2), 313, 388 (2).
