The Redhunter and The View From Alger's Window

Dear WFB,

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As an occasional proud contributor to the pages of National Review, I assure you that I was not rushing to agree with Eric Alterman's response to your book in order to beat him over the head once I succeeded in loosening myself "from any threat of association" with The Redhunter. I do not fear any association with you, or indeed with much of what conservatives have to say. My response is based on serious and substantive differences with your argument about Joe McCarthy, an argument that your Slate contribution fails to address.

In fact, I get a strange sense of déjà vu reading your book and your retort. What we are undertaking now is nothing less than a rehash of the same fight that took place during the McCarthy years in the ranks of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. It is, indeed, the fight chronicled in the very book I reviewed for your journal, in which I pointed out that the CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom was supporting liberal anti-communism, and that the very people you mention, such as Max Eastman, broke ranks and moved to support the far right and McCarthy.

I am in agreement, as you must know, with the historian Richard Gid Powers, who has explained in his important book Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism, that McCarthy was part of the group he terms "radical countersubversives ... who would wreak havoc on American political civility." Powers makes the strongest case possible that what McCarthy did was to destroy the strength and vitality of anti-communism. Isaac Don Levine said at the time that "the moment he had heard what McCarthy had done in Wheeling, he had known the anti-communist cause was doomed." What other judgment can one make about the man? McCarthy, after all, accused one of the nation's great patriots, General George C. Marshall, of being a traitor who acted on behalf of the Soviet Union. This, Powers correctly writes, was "the red web thesis raised to the grandiose levels of cosmic madness." As he points out, McCarthy backers like John T. Flynn began to attack Americans for Democratic Action, the very keynote anti-Communist liberal group, as not sincerely opposed to communism. In the end, as Powers writes:

I'm afraid that what your book does is to further allow the identification between McCarthyism and anti-communism to continue, and to blur the important lines between responsible and knowledgeable anti-communism and the McCarthyite variety. Indeed, it is this very insistence that McCarthy, for all his faults, was the only "vehicle" for anti-communism that allows people like Eric Alterman, Ellen Shrecker, and Joshua Micah Marshall in The American Prospect this past year to condemn Harvey Klehr, John Haynes, and myself as "the new McCarthyites" precisely because we defend responsible anticommunism.

Now, it is certainly true that you do not hide McCarthy's darker side, and in fact you offer much new material about it, especially in his period of his decline. The scene in which you have your stand-in, Harry Bontecou, awakened by McCarthy in the middle of the night in which the senator reveals his plan for the liberation of China, is certainly a dismaying shocker. I share your amazement and sense of relief that when in fact this happened to you, you were delighted that nothing much came of it. I grant you, then, that you show some of McCarthy's shoddy excesses. But that John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, and James Burnham backed his cause proves very little. They were among the anti-Communists who joined Gid Powers' countersubversive conspiracy theorists, and Burnham himself authored a defense of McCarthy's investigations, The Web of Subversion: Underground Networks in the U.S. Government.

Was McCarthy, then, as you write, "the incarnation of the anti-communist movement?" That very question is the essential one. I would argue that in fact, what he accomplished was to wreck and destroy the previously existing anti-Communist movement, so much so that what he produced was anti-anti-communism, in which every solid attack on Communists--including Communists in government--could be written off as McCarthyism. Indeed, and I recall a sentence in your novel making the same point, it got to be the case that the only legacy of McCarthyism was that one could not even call a Red a Red, lest one be accused of the horror of Red-baiting. How many times has Angela Davis been identified as a civil-rights leader, rather than a leading Communist and apologist for the Soviet system?

As for whether McCarthyism produced a reign of terror, on this point, I am in agreement with you. I would add to your list the case of Jean-Paul Sartre, who proclaimed, "America has rabies," while at the same moment in history he was whitewashing and defending the continuing Stalinist terror in Russia and Eastern Europe. As for Lattimore, McCarthy went way beyond him. He used the scholar's fellow-traveling and apologetics to smear everyone at State, and even called Dean Acheson "the voice for the mind of Lattimore." Really, how do you explain that one? Or do you think this was a responsible contribution to the debate?

I have one final question. In your book, you have a scene in which J. Edgar Hoover reveals the nature of the Venona files to Joe McCarthy. Literary license for dialogue is one thing. But in a book based on real events and facts, this goes way beyond that. There is no evidence that anything like that ever took place. Indeed, it is more than unlikely. There is lots of evidence about Hoover's distrust and disdain for McCarthy and later for Roy Cohn, despite the FBI leaks in the early stages when it proved advantageous to Hoover's interests. Hoover knew enough to never share such a major secret with the irresponsible McCarthy. To suggest otherwise is to change the actual course of historical events in a way that simply never took place.

Finally, let me urge Slate readers to buy and to read your book. I have no aversion to letting others judge its merits for themselves. If they end up agreeing with the critics you cite, all the better. But I stand by my judgment.

Sincerely,
Ron Radosh

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Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and the author of Who Speaks for America? (click here to buy the book). Ronald Radosh is senior research associate at the Center for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University and co-author, with Harvey Klehr, of The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (click here to buy the book). This week they discuss The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy, by William F. Buckley Jr. (click here to buy the book), and The View From Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir, by Tony Hiss (click here to buy the book). Addendum: William Buckley Quotes Himself in Self-Defense

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