Echoes of Joe McCarthy in Donald Trump's Rise

By Lou Cannon - July 31, 2015

He was a Democrat turned Republican who made alarming accusations and liked the sound of his own voice. He used statistics that could not be verified or were demonstrably wrong. He frightened the establishment, which was slow to combat him, for he had unlimited resources and bullied his critics. He perplexed the press, making so many charges that reporters could not keep up with them. He was at first dismissed as a clown but he built a grassroots following among people fed up with conventional politics.

He wasn’t Donald Trump but Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who for nearly five years in the early 1950s struck fear into official Washington with accusations that communists had infiltrated the national government.

McCarthy smeared two of President Harry Truman’s cabinet officers — Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense George Marshall, a distinguished World War II general — and accused scores of civil servants, several of whom retired, of being “inclined to communism.” Less remembered is that he ruined the careers of others by implying that they were homosexuals. “McCarthyism,” a word coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block, was defined as "the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism."

McCarthy’s rise was abetted, as Trump’s has been, by press coverage that took outrageous claims at face value. In those days of television’s infancy, Americans depended for their news on newspapers; 85 percent of the national news came from wire services. They were ill-equipped to deal with McCarthy, whose first headline-grabbing foray occurred on a brisk February day in 1950 in Wheeling, W.Va., when he told a Republican women’s club: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”

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In 1951, at the age of 26, Kennedy had left an investigative position at the Department of Justice to organize his brother John's bid for the Senate. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., reports in his definitive biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), RFK had little tolerance for politics as usual: "One day when a leading labor figure sat chatting in the headquarters, as Massachusetts politicians were wont to do, Robert brusquely ushered him out: 'If you're not going to work, don't hang around here.'"

"Politicians do nothing but hold meetings," he was to say. "You can't get any work out of a politician."

Following the successful race, Robert had little desire to return to the Justice Department and the glory-seeking J. Edgar Hoover. Little did he realize. A Joseph P. Kennedy phone call to Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy got him a job on McCarthy's Senate subcommittee investigating subversive activities. But while Kennedy pored over shipping logs, investigating trade practices with Communist China, McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn set about smearing leftists and drumming up accusations of subversion against members of the State Department, the US Army, and anyone else who would guarantee headlines.

By March 1953, Kennedy'd had enough of McCarthy and the Committee: "I thought it was headed for disaster. I told [McCarthy] he was out of his mind and was going to destroy himself....Most of the investigations were instituted on the basis of some preconceived notion by the chief counsel or his staff members and not on the basis of information that had been developed....I thought [he] made a mistake in allowing the Committee to operate in such a fashion, told him so and resigned."

When the Committee's Democratic senators offered Kennedy a seat on the Committee as minority counsel, he promptly accepted over McCarthy's objections.

"Kennedy's job," Roy Cohn wrote later, "was to write out pertinent questions for the Democratic senators to ask at the hearings....in [one particular anti-Communist] plan he saw an opportunity to jibe at us. He fed his questions to Senator [Henry] Jackson, who used them to fire a barrage of ridicule....They picked at point after point in [the] plan, finding something hilarious in each. And every time Kennedy handed him something, Senator Jackson would go into fits of laughter."

Weeks of televised hearings provoked a similar reaction among viewers - when McCarthy and Cohn's ruthless partisan attacks weren't inducing outright revulsion. Robert Kennedy had been among the first to see McCarthy for the witch-hunter he was. McCarthy was censured by the Senate in December, 1954.