What Donald Trump could learn from Joe McCarthy: The armed forces are too big to bully
The Army-McCarthy hearings were McCarthy's downfall. After his war with the Pentagon, the country was finally done with his anti-communist crusade.
It was high-roller Joe McCarthy’s go-for-broke toss of the dice. In the fall of 1953, he put the U.S. Army in his crosshairs. He had already gone after the State Department, the Voice of America and the Truman White House, charging that each was infested with nests of communist moles. Now he was picking the most stouthearted and sacrosanct institution in America to make his closing case. For good measure, he was giving a poke in the eye to Dwight Eisenhower, the new war hero president, calling him a johnny-come-lately to the homefront Cold War.
The question the country was asking was: Why? What would make this scrappiest of lawmakers go eyeball to eyeball with America’s mighty fighting machine, gambling that the other side would blink?
Many Americans readily accepted on McCarthy’s say-so that there was a Soviet plot reaching deep into the soul of our defense forces, even though that meant admitting that they too had been duped. What would we do without Joe? Others were aghast. This was the Army, after all, which had just waged a lethal war on the Korean Peninsula against gun-toting communists. What was the Republican Wisconsin senator thinking? Half a century after the fact, records have been unlocked and memories unpacked that offer answers resonating at a moment when President Donald Trump is likewise meddling with the military — and when its brass are pushing back.
McCarthy's foolish challenge
His wartime diaries make clear that McCarthy had it in for the armed services going back to his World War II days as a tail gunner in the South Pacific. The officers in charge showed themselves to be “mental midgets,” he wrote, in everything from their interservice rivalries to the unfit-to-eat rations they fed grunts like him.
His self-ignited rage reached a flashpoint when, as a powerful U.S. senator, he had placed at the center of what he claimed was a vast communist conspiracy a series of World War II generals venerated by the public, from George Marshall, the orchestrator of the Allied victory, to Telford Taylor, head of American code breakers at England’s Bletchley Park. The Army, McCarthy said, was infected, and only he was fearless enough to rip off the bandage.
Now McCarthy was pointing his accusing finger at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, which he was sure would be his grand catch. The fort had everything the senator required — Jewish radicals schooled at the left-wing City College of New York; the most tempting of targets for saboteurs bent on intercepting the military’s most closely guarded secrets on telecommunications, radar and guided-missile controls; and the very laboratory that had once employed uber-traitor Julius Rosenberg. No wonder Joe was salivating.
McCarthy’s first challenge was the same inability to back up his charges that had plagued him since he had launched his crusade against communism three-and-a-half years before. So he leaned on exaggeration. Signing election petitions became the equivalent of being a card-carrying Communist Party member. Left-leaning communications clerks and dispatchers were upgraded to national security threats. If those tactics sound familiar it’s because McCarthy’s protégé, the fire-breathing attorney Roy Cohn, decades later became Trump’s tutor.
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While the Army at first mollified McCarthy, it developed not just a backbone but also an instinct for the jugular just in time for the famous Army-McCarthy hearings. The senator who appeared on television screens was a menacing figure with a perpetual beard, a perspiration-soaked suit and the swagger of the town rowdy. He interrupted decorated Army officers mid-testimony, barreled out of the hearing room when he didn’t win his way, and growled his catchphrase “point of order” so often that street urchins were mimicking him. An astounding 1 in 2 Americans was following all this on TV, radio or in the daily newspapers.
Military pushes back against Trump
Their disillusionment was evident in George Gallup’s polls. They had the senator at 50% popularity in January 1954, before the hearings began in April, suggesting that a full half of America believed the scandalous things he was saying about the armed forces. By the time the inquiry was wrapping up in June, that believability yardstick had sunk to 34%.
Suddenly, America’s infatuation with the crusading senator was over, or nearly so. Looking back, that fall from favor seems inevitable given his bad behavior and his arrogance in calling out the ultimate authority. But at the time, his war with the Pentagon riveted the nation and, when the proceedings began, who would win was far from clear.
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This is more than a matter of history. Trump has been poking the military in the eye in a way that is reminiscent of McCarthy, pressuring it to rout demonstrators, peaceful and otherwise, from the streets of America. The military brass at first mollified their commander in chief, but now they are speaking out — from retired generals and admirals to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of Defense.
Trump, like McCarthy, could push back against the onslaught when it was coming from the press, protesters or political foes. But as the Wisconsin senator's downfall makes clear, the armed forces are too big to bully.
Larry Tye is an author and a former reporter at The Boston Globe. His eighth book, "Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy," will be published July 7. Follow him on Twitter: @LarryTye
