When the end came for Joe McCarthy, it was Edward R. Murrow who delivered the knockout blow. On his CBS program “See It Now,” Murrow ran damning footage of the red-baiting Wisconsin senator, who appeared hectoring and disheveled to viewers. Murrow proclaimed that McCarthy’s “primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind.” The senator’s reputation never recovered from Murrow’s nationally televised exposé.
But Murrow also recognized that his moment’s dangers ran deeper than one man. He urged Americans to accept their own culpability in the tragedy of McCarthyism. McCarthy “didn’t create this situation of fear,” Murrow said, “he merely exploited it.” The broadcaster quoted Shakespeare to drive home his point: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
There may be no better diagnosis for our own Trump-era predicament, and revisiting the Red Scare reveals a great deal about how we ended up here. As Clay Risen’s meaty and powerfully relevant new book, “Red Scare,” makes clear, our own times are ringing with echoes of the clamorous battles of mid-20th-century McCarthyism.
Risen, a reporter at The New York Times who has written a history of Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, among other books, coyly insists that he is “not concerned with drawing parallels between the past and the present” and desires to “leave it up to the reader to find those as they will.” But this is disingenuous. In his 400-some pages Risen touches on anti-fascism, white supremacy, campus activism, anti-elitism, cancel culture, virtue signaling, doxxing, book bans, election interference, anti-immigrant racism, F.B.I. overreach, conspiracy thinking, antisemitism, the surveillance state, anti-colonialism, the Koch family and America First-style ultranationalism. To suggest all this amounts simply to a Rorschach test for his readers stretches credulity.
Risen dates the beginning of the second Red Scare (the first one erupted during the World War I era) to 1946, when Billy Wilkerson, the conservative anti-Communist publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, went to confession at his Catholic church on Sunset Boulevard. “Father, I’m launching a campaign, and it’s gonna cause a lot of hurt,” he told his priest. “I just need to know what to do.” The priest replied, “Get those bastards, Billy.”
Over the following decade, crusading anti-Communists ruined countless careers, driving good men and women into the professional wilderness and, in some cases, to suicide. Even those who survived the ordeal — often by naming names themselves — were nevertheless deeply scarred. “I don’t think you have the foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing,” one of them, the actor Sterling Hayden, later told his psychiatrist.
But Risen does not dwell unduly on the agency of individuals like Hayden and McCarthy. Instead he portrays the Red Scare as a cultural battle fueled by the tensions of the deepening midcentury Cold War. It is a conflict, he makes clear, that never truly abated. Risen compares the destructive power of McCarthyism’s flame to a “coal-seam fire” that has been burning underground for the better part of the past century.
He also shows that the flame was stoked by members of both political parties. New Deal-era Democrats most interested in fighting right-wing extremism led early versions of the investigative committees, and it was the Democratic president Harry Truman who instituted the loyalty program that propelled the anti-Communist movement early on. Just as today Elon Musk has built his Department of Government Efficiency atop an older Obama-era agency, midcentury Republicans took charge of apparatuses of power once cultivated by Democrats — then turned them against their domestic enemies.
Risen tells his story with a punch and an economy that are at times almost Hemingwayesque. Of McCarthy he writes: “He dressed like a slob, ate like a slob, talked like a slob.” For the 37th U.S. president he reserves this jab: “Nobody besides his family much liked Richard Nixon, not then, not before, not ever.” Some of Risen’s scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses in the poorly air-conditioned committee room.
Still, Risen’s book is largely a synthesis of existing sources, and it lacks the immediacy of works like “Naming Names,” Victor Navasky’s classic account of the Hollywood blacklists. Reporting in the 1970s, Navasky was able to interview more than 150 witnesses. When at one point the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo blurts an expletive as he puffs on his cigarette holder and downs his highball, the Red Scare starts to feel almost personal.
Much of the ground Risen covers has also been well trod by others. The story of Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the “pumpkin papers” has now been done to death. Risen devotes an entire short chapter to the persecution of Robert Oppenheimer; after the release of the Oscar-winning movie, it is hard to imagine a reader of this book who is not already familiar with that episode.
“Red Scare” resonates, nevertheless, because it speaks so directly to our current quandary. For Americans on the left, the despair that followed last November’s elections was fueled partly by a sense that Trumpism is endemic, not an aberration. Racism and xenophobia, it is now evident, are woven into the American fabric.
But “cultural pessimism,” as it has been called, can be self-fulfilling. We have seen glimmers in recent months of the kind of individual courage — often at great personal cost — that helped to illuminate the Red Scare’s darkest pits; I am thinking of the cascade of prosecutors who quit their jobs rather than follow orders that clashed with their own best judgment.
Despite these hopeful signs, Risen’s book underlines the persistent danger. “There is a lineage to the American hard right of today,” he writes, “and to understand it, we need to understand its roots in the Red Scare.” He quotes Albert Camus’s warning in “The Plague” that the “bacillus never dies or disappears for good.” Thanks to citizens of conscience like Murrow, Americans of the 1950s managed to suppress their own epidemic of intolerance — for a time. We, too, must find a way.
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