Stan Should Have Seen It Coming
A recent NR review by Ronald Radosh of M. Stanton Evans’s defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Blacklisted by History, has caused me to think about two phases of the postwar conservative movement. The first of these phases, and the one from whence Evans himself comes, took place in the 1950s, when McCarthyism became a pillar of the National Review ideology. Looking at the magazine’s issues back then and reading that controversial work by WFB and his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), one finds out how critical a watershed McCarthy’s career was for self-described conservatives of that period. As an Austrian émigré Willi Schlamm stressed in his introduction to Buckley-Bozell, the battle of that epoch was not simply about a particular Wisconsin senator but also about the defense of Western civilization, which for Schlamm took the form of “McCarthyism.”
Although not all of NR’s contributors shared this view, and the exceptions included such illustrious figures as Russell Kirk and Whittaker Chambers, for many others on the right, McCarthy’s crusade against Communist subversion defined their early lives. When I once visited the Republican museum in Ripon, Wisconsin (near McCarthy’s hometown of Appleton), the curator told me that the display of McCarthy’s memorabilia received special attention from local patrons. When the curator also noted that “some people think he hurt the party,” I immediately shot back “Don’t believe it! He was great patriot.” Yes, I, too, had been a McCarthyite in my gut. My father had once referred to the Senator as a “real American” and I was strengthened in my predilection for him when I read NR in its early years.
While I no longer share Evans’s unbounded admiration for Tailgunner Joe, I remain suspicious of people who fly into a rage over anti-Communism and over what the Stalinoid Lilian Hellman called the “scoundrel times” of the 1950s. I still agree with Irving Kristol’s powerful observation, composed while he was still supposedly on the left in 1952, “For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. And the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with justification.” The hysterical anti-anti-Communism I have witnessed in the academic world over the last forty years, plus the outbreak of “antifascist” totalitarian politics throughout the West following the implosion of the Soviet block, have led me to look askance at anti-McCarthyites of all stripes—even while understanding the excesses of McCarthy’s investigative methods.
For the record, however, I agree with Radosh that Evans may understate the recklessness of McCarthy’s charges against Gen. George Marshall, who served on the whole with honor as Truman’s Secretary of State. Evans also underplays the Senator’s bombastic attacks on the patriotism of the military, attacks that may have been influenced by the sordid affair between the senator’s counsel, Roy Cohn, and Cohn’s male lover C. David Schine, who had been drafted and who later tried to get out of the army. McCarthy’s bestowing of favors on this clownish pair, which included pleasure trips bestowed on them at government expense to investigate pro-Communist holdings in the USIA’s libraries in Europe, might have been as harebrain as Radosh suggests. Certainly there is more than enough to criticize about the swashbuckling anti-Communist from Wisconsin, before he fell from power and died of cirrhosis.
What is omitted, however, from most assaults on the McCarthyites, and from Radosh’s brief is the (for me) self-evident hypocrisy of those Republican leaders, who during the Democratic “decade of treason,” had been mute when transparent oversights occurred, namely when the Democratic administration whitewashed Soviet crimes and indulged the “antifascist” Communists in the United States. From their initial reluctance to get involved in “another European war,” the Republicans had moved on to becoming less than serious adversaries of the Democrats, and they remained that until long after the War was over. Indeed some of the staunchest opponents of the Soviets came from the right wing of the Democratic administration, e.g., James Forrestal and Joseph Grew. The Republicans were playing catch-up as the weaker national party by focusing exclusively on the catastrophic mistakes of the Democrats that they, as well as their opponents, had made by allowing Communist agents to reach high places in the government.
I am surprised by Radosh’s assertion, printed by the way in a magazine in which Buckley as late as 1989 correctly noted Owen Lattimore’s longtime Communist association, that McCarthy was misrepresenting Lattimore. From the investigative reports of Anthony Kubek down to the work of the very centrist Arthur Herman, abundant evidence is available for Lattimore’s intense devotion to the Communist Party. As a longtime board member of the Communist-controlled Institute of Pacific Relations and as a shameless flatterer of Stalin and his economically just “democracy,” Lattimore was a Communist apologist of the most extreme kind. (Radosh’s attempt to understate his loyalty by calling him a “shill” is much too exculpatory.) According to Herman, Lattimore might have been an actual party member but such technicalities should not even matter. Would Radosh deny that someone who hung out with Nazis and gave a Nazi salute beneath a swastika in 1942 should have been treated as a Nazi collaborator? If only he and other anti-communists of the Left could feel the same strong anger against Soviet lackeys, namely, those types whom the early National Review had had the temerity to notice and denounce!
Although Evans has done exhaustive research for this book, clearly he is going through a topic that has already been the subject of many previous studies—and not all of them by liberals. Radosh asks why another book on McCarthy should seem necessary. What seems to be happening is that fulltime “movement conservatives,” who started their activism about fifty years ago, feel an urgent need to show that their anti-Communist careers had been fully vindicated. And what better way to do that than by defending the turbulent career of the most controversial American anti-Communist, and the one most hated on the Left.
Far be it from me to disparage this particular concern, one that seems far more relevant than the current yak-yak about “islamofascist” threats. The intelligentsia and the political class have never really come to terms with the enormity of Communist crimes in the 20th century, and they have diverted attention from the murderous regimes they once defended by conjuring up imaginary Nazi enemies. For having documented the mendacity of American apologists for Stalin and for his accomplices, old-time movement conservatives, including Evans, deserve our praise.
But there is another (for me) more problematic side of this story. Basic to the “conservative movement” since the 1980s, in the same way as anti-Communism had defined the Right during the McCarthy era, is the rise of the neoconservative power elite. My book-length studies of the postwar American Right dwell on this development and there is therefore no need to expand on it here. What allowed the takeover to go forward is that scads of helpers offered their services to the recently arrived powerbrokers. The degree of collaboration often took alarming forms, and sometimes that collaboration involved people turning their backs on long-term associations in order to please the occupying forces. The question I would pose to these old-timers, who have clung to the movement and even taken neoconservative funding over the years, is why they believe their anti-Communist militancy should count for more than their years of truckling to the neoconservatives.
There were those Southerners who (to their everlasting credit) pulled out of the movement after the neocons had destroyed the career and what remained of the life of that Southern gentleman Mel Bradford. I have known such people, and they never regretted they had taken a principled position, even after having suffered financially and socially for their stand. At the same time, I have less pleasant memories of other acquaintances of the 1980s, of self-identified movement conservatives fawning on the neoconservatives in National Review and in various policy institutes. While WFB undoubtedly set the most extreme and most abject example of such accommodation, there were others who acted just as opportunistically, as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Back in the 1980s, I noticed how aging veterans showed up at the annual meetings of the Philadelphia Society to regale the young with stories about how they had “fought back against the Left.” Unfortunately most of these would-be warriors caved in when the Left came on the scene. All they apparently wanted was a pat on the back and a sinecure that would allow them, courtesy of their new patrons, to write about past heroic battles.
Evans’s defense of McCarthy, an ambitious book recently savaged in the reconstructed NR, typifies the kind of exercise that the veterans of the wars of the 1950s are inclined to produce. Such writing is, among other things, a rite of self-justification, but the people who publish them were in some cases not equally courageous in standing up to the leftist invasion of their movement in the 1980s. The changes these veterans have learned to live with are the price of their collaboration; and the acceptance of that price has made it harder and harder to go on praising and condemning particular heroes of the Old Right. Robert E. Lee, Joe McCarthy and Robert Taft, to give just three examples, are no longer morally acceptable to the leftward-racing establishment Right. M. Stanton Evans may now be learning about what happens to someone who stays in a compromised movement for too long. He has discovered a bitter truth that Mel Bradford, Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Clyde Wilson, Claes Ryn, Russell Kirk, Boyd Cathy, Peter Stanlis, and George Panichas could all have explained to him 20 years ago. You see there were people back then, even outside the South, who wised up in a hurry. But in Stan’s case perhaps better late than never.
Comments
I thank Paul Gottfried for his recounting of a not-too-pleasant history. Yes, it was perhaps the debacle with Professor Mel Bradford’s nomination that really got the attention of some of us. Led by George Will, the neo-conservative press effectively labeled him a “racist” and a “neo-Confederate” [he had written effective critiques of Lincoln], and successfully torpedeoed his nomination to he NEH. Then, there was the vicious attack on Russell Kirk by Midge Decter (as an “anti-semite"). But it was much more than those incidents: there was a sea-change in attitude and in basic philosophy that took place, such that NR and other such neo-con organs are actually now on “the other side” of the philosohpical divide. Sure, there may be an occasional good article or review, but the fundamental philosophy is different from that of the Old Right.
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You woote: “The question I would pose to these old-timers, who have clung to the movement and even taken neoconservative funding over the years, is why they believe their anti-Communist militancy should count for more than their years of truckling to the neoconservatives…Such writing is, among other things, a rite of self-justification, but the people who publish them were in some cases not equally courageous in standing up to the leftist invasion of their movement in the 1980s.”
Yes, you’ve hit the nail on the head on this issue. I might suggest that it was MONEY that really charged the sellout of these old time conservatives that let the neo-cons and ex-leftists like “Rotten” Radosh or Kristol take over the conservative movement, with the money provided by the CEO classes.
Interesting observation (which I agree with btw) that “anti-fascism” back then---and even today---meant communist sympathizer, or leftist.
Also, it’s amazing that McCarthy---the hero of conservatives---had the notorious and evil homosexual Roy Cohn, as an intimate.
And why don’t you mention Bobby Kennedy who was also on his staff, competing with Roy Cohn for McCarthy’s favor. Of course, after McCarthy’s fall, Bobby Kennedy later got in lockstep with the liberals/leftists, and pimped his career fighting “organized crime”, another ludicrous event given the fact that Joe Kennedy made his fortune in part with cooperation with the mafia, and both JFK and Bobby had ties to them throughout their careers.
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Mr. Gottfried, what is it that makes you such a chronic Job’s Comforter for the paleoconservative movement? Why another book about Joe McCarthy? How about Evans’ possible intention to inject just a smidgen of truth in a saga that has been distorted almost beyond repair? For generations of Americans, the historical status of McCarthy rests somewhere between Pol Pot and Gilles de Rais. If Evans book was just another run-of-the-mill McCarthy demonization fest then, sure, your question has legitimacy; the South China Sea could be filled with all the anti-McCarthy screeds in circulation - in every medium. But for a biography that paints a warts-and-all portrait of a public servant who really WAS a public servant? Who genuinely discerned a clear and present danger that this country’s top policy positions were riddled with foreign agents and dogmatic fellow travelers happy to turn this country – and its people – over to a regime that had annihilated millions? Evans’ tries to bring a little sanity back to McCarthy’s legacy. And, for that, he’s just being “self serving”? What the hell are you talking about?
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Something tells me that this drift into Big Government Conservatism by the NR is only a natural occurrence for a publishing business. After all, if one is disciplined enough to hue strongly to traditional laissez-faire , small government principles....and one is in the business to write about politics and government, well, there aint much to talk about....it would be better to buy a piece of Town and Country or Vogue.
The kind of “conservative government” Norman Podhoretz champions is far better for business because it grows and seethes and accretes the kind of gothic drama that is only surpassed by the most florid Romance Novels and Detective Magazines. Sex sells and the orgy of geopolitical dysfunction that the Poddys and their ilk promote sells big.
After all, one must consider one’s real estate portfolio too, no matter what political philosophy one might hold. Old Fashioned conservatism would return the Federal District to the status of a backwater slough in a lousy climate and this would not bode well for those prosperous suburbs ringing it like diamonds sparkling about a chunk of coal. Old Fashioned Conservatism would be a drag on one’s multinational stock portfolio too, particularly in those ever-splitting military-centered stocks you think so masculine.
Exactly what might one talk about as a political pundit if the government was dominated by old conservatism? Mr. Paul seems a fine man with noble and chaste aims but he aint entertaining on purpose. He rains on parades and this just aint Souza-like copy.
The Beltway is a Giant Neoclassical Whorehouse and while old fashioned conservatives may occasionally use such establishments, they usually don’t like to crow about it.
These Neo-Cons though, they are a Busby Bekeley Oscar Wilde Extravaganza and thats just good business, for the dysfunction-prone. If Podhoretz had not stormed the NR, the NR would have likely invented him, particularly when the Soviets switched from the Political pages to the Business Section. I suppose it’s just the hidden hand of the Free Market at work.
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There are in fact books about McCarthy, from
Buckley-Bozell to Arthur Hermann, which go from
highly laudatory to mildly favorable. Not every book
on this figure has been uniformly defamatory.Nor is
there reason to believe that the anti-anti-Communist
media and academy will change their tune because
Stan Evans has produced a heavily documented defense
of many of McCarthy’s charges. The Left’s
investment in anti-anti-Communism is not based on
rational conviction; nor is it open to the airing of
further evidence that McCarthy may have been right.
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i do hope that omitting joe sobran from the final paragraph was merely an oversight and not due to fear.
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Mr. Bradford may have been a fine gentleman but he was an awkward choice for the post. Wouldn’t you think a Republican president would have been informed by his staff that Mr. Bradford was a severe critic of the party’s first president (and a hero to most Americans)? My own personal disillusionment with movement came with the Bush I presidency, the Gulf War I, and the Buchanan campaigns. It was completed by the Clinton presidency and the abject Republican response. The good news is that disillusionment is a good thing. Remove the illusions and one can proced on the search for truth!
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Mr. Bradford became a bad choice after the neocons
invested money and energy for the purpose of wiping
him out. The second edition of my work on the
conservative movement investigates the campaign of
vilification unleashed against Mel by neocon
foundations and neocon journalists. I’m unclear, by
the way, why a nominee for a federal post must approve
of the first president elected by the party that is
currently in power as a precondition for getting the
post. Would a critic of Jefferson or Jackson or James
Buchanan be denied a post by the current Democratic
Party because of unkind remarks about their party’s
past presidents? Somehow I doubt it.
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It is bad enough that NR has nullified the worthy cause of its founders but the efforts of Jonah Goldberg to redefine the Left as fascist shows that NR has fallen to depths from which it cannot be saved.
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Defenders of McCarthy, like Willmoore Kendall in the halcyon National Review days of the 1950s, used to attack the senator’s opponents on the grounds that they had an unrealistic concept of society as “open” to all questions, a tolerance which Tailgunner Joe allegedly violated in his persecution of the Reds. Kendall’s view was that there is no such thing as openness to all questions: every society has a consensus which puts limits on discussion.
Judging from the recent imbroglio over Evans’ book, it is apparent that Kendall gave the anti-McCarthy left too much credit: they were no more “open” to ideas than Stalin or Mao.
Paul and I would agree that the neocons who kiboshed Bradford showed a similar lack of openness to ideas. Woe to anyone who heretically questions the consensus fashioned by Fox and CNN. (Just look at what happened to Ron Paul when he praised DiLorenzo’s studies of Lincoln.)
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Something tells me that this drift into Big Government Conservatism by the NR is only a natural occurrence for a publishing business
It wasn’t a drift. It was Big Gov’t with a bullet from the get go.
It soon appears that Buckley is really, in 1952 terms, a totalitarian socialist, and what is more, admits it.
He admits that his opposition to Statism, eloquently expressed at the beginning, is merely romantic academicism. For Buckley favors: “the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy,” and by implication supports ECA aid and 50-billion dollar “defense” budgets. He declares that the “thus far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union imminently threatens U.S. security,” and that therefore “we have got to accept Big Government for the duration–for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged...except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” Therefore, he concludes, we must all support “large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington–even with Truman at the reins of it all.”
In the light of this errant nonsense, Buckley, considered by practically everybody (and, saddest to relate, by himself) as an “extreme individualist” must be classified as a defacto totalitarian.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard6.html
Garet Garret was right in 1938.
http://www.rooseveltmyth.com/docs/The_Revolution_Was.html
The Revolution won. Liberty lost. Ever since then the decline into totalitarianism has been, and will continue to be, unstoppable.
All we few liberty loving conservatives can do is to try and learn as much as we can, from such men as Mr. Gottfried, and pass on the truth to our children.
As a “movement,” we is dead. Sure,the occasional Paul campaign (or Howard Phillips, or Harry Browne, or Pat Buchanan) will come along there will be moments of fun and great memories and talk about The Constitution as the Rule of Law, etc.
But, come on. Have you ever listened to Rush, Hannity, or Beck? They have never, and will never, ask any of their guests if they can justify any of their votes by identifying the specific Constitutional provision authorising them to legislate or act in that area. And THEY are the face of the “Conservative” movement supposedly closest to the people. And they bray INCESSANTLY about The Constitution.
I remember how Robert Bork was excoriated when he noted the 10th Amendment was a dead letter. He was right, of course. But he should have remained mute on the point.
While I was living in Maine, I got a chance to publicly ask Rep Baldacci (Democrat Dim Wit, Penobscot County) how his Congressional voting record could be reconciled with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of The Constitution.
He had NO idea what they were. I had to tell him. Afterwards, my friends were mad at ME because I had “put him on the spot.”
When I told them a politician who did not know the Ninth and Tenth Amendments was as dumb and dangerous as a Priest who did not know the Ninth and Tenth Commandments
they responded with anger and frustration.
Who could be expected to know such a thing?
And that describes the reality all around us.
Few know. Fewer care.
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The Democrats have (quietly) rejected the legacy of the presidents Prof. Gottfried mentioned. They know better than to attack these historical heroes, however. The Republicans have by no means repudiated Lincoln (Publicly) and anyone they choose for a prominent post ought to be vetted accordingly.
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Sorry, but when I read this I see people lost in past principles who fail to see that we have become an empire and as the Romans did democracy has become a dual script.
I understand history, but, by GOD, rehashing it wont cure our political problems of today. Unite for we are divided!
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“The Left’s
investment in anti-anti-Communism is not based on
rational conviction; nor is it open to the airing of
further evidence that McCarthy may have been right.”
Since Communism is dead as a doornail, isn’t the Left’s “investment in anti-anticommunism” equally as bankrupt as anti-communism?
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Anti-communism almost got Europe, North America, and half of Asia wiped off the map… piss on Joe’s grave
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Nice article, but I’m not sure how rehashing history propels the conservative movement forward.
Goldberg, with his leftist fascism inanity, is pure Rovian horse-plop.[Attack others with your weakness]
Divide those that divide you.
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Communism is history but its supporters control universities, media and think tankds.
In every war losers are ousted from positions of power. In America the losers are revising history to protect their reputation and maintain the grip on power.
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I think Stan was one of the people trying to ignore the paleo-neo split. Sadly, a lot of “conservatives” play this sick little game and try to pretend that the division never opened up. They do not want to look at the way the fissure reveals what’s actually going in the “movement” as well as what the shape of current politics is all about. This is why it is so difficult for some to read Prof. Gottfried’s books or look at what’s happened to the NR.
I think everyone needs to hear this message in Prof. Gottfried’s post: “Stan should have seen it coming.” That Stan didn’t indicates that he was doing his best to turn a blind eye to what was happening around him. That was stupid, that was foolish, and many other people - people who should know better - are doing it too.
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There’s a big, crucial difference between “rehasing history” and reclaiming history.
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...Just as there’s a big, crucial difference between spelling and misspelling…
REHASHING!
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Both Dr. Gottfried and several of the writebackers here seem to assume that Mr. Evans is guilty of something. Yet rather than make specific charges, they speak vaguely of a set of conservatives who think this or that, or of Evans’ failure to queue up properly when the split occurred. What precisely is he *personally* guilty of? I had never heard of him before this book came out.
Furthermore, Ann Coulter has come to the defense of both McCarthy and of Evans. She has correclty described “NR” as “increasingly irrelevant.” She is much more intelligent than the Faux News folks who idolize her, and when she isn’t speaking about the war, she is often quite witty, insightful (and inciting!), and genuinely conservative.
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The last few posts prompt a reply I hesitate to make. I was both a strong defender of Mel Bradford and a president of the Philadelphia Society as recently as a few years ago. i apologize for neither.
Paul’s essay may well have been titled, “Stan Sort of Deserved What He’s Getting.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t address the substance of the book, but only plays with the neocon reaction to it, bashing NR (legitimately) but implying that Stan Evans is not a pure enough paleo.
Stan is a conservative. Period. He has resisted since the 1950s attempts to reduce American conservatism to ideology. That he has at one time or another been accused of being too libertarian, or too anticommunist, or too traditionalist speaks well of him to me.
This aside, read Stan’s book. Don’t judge it from the perspective of supposed internal right-wing squabbles, but from the evidence he presents. Isn’t that what real conservatives have always tried to do?
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Postmodern Americanism is scarier than Communism. The contemporary West has degenerated to the point where even the USSR looks relatively conservative in hindsight.
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