How McCarthy Hurt the U.S. Cause

As the Watkins committee put the finishing touches on the report that may finish Senator McCarthy as a major force in U.S. politics, TIME and LIFE Correspondent Emmet John Hughes cabled from London an estimate of the harm McCarthy had done to U.S. policy in Europe. Wrote Hughes:

No special session of the U.S. Senate--only the common sense and alerted conscience of the American people --can justly weigh one sober charge against Senator Joseph McCarthy. The charge is: more deeply than any living American, he has hurt his country's chances to rally the peoples of Europe against Communism.

The American in Europe in the year 1954 needs but a few weeks or even days to know the sense of Europe's opinion on the subject. A full year here produces evidence that is sickeningly sufficient. From Moscow to London, from Bremen to Bari, the disgust of Europe is as plain and great as the cost to America, although perhaps not matching the comfort to the Soviet Union.

A few witnesses can swiftly sketch the indictment:

There was the Intourist guide in Kiev, giving me a steely grin of mock solicitude a few minutes after we met and murmuring: "And do you think Senator McCarthy will really be able to prove your last President was a traitor secretly helping us?"

sb There was the smirk of Hjalmar Schacht, in his neat office in Duesseldorf, insinuating politely: "Perhaps now you realize that it is not so easy for a people to get rid of demagogues just by wishing them to go away, no?"

sb There was a brave young German veteran who had risked his life trying to assassinate Hitler, carrying as his scars a twisted arm, a wooden leg and a tormented disenchantment with America: "How do you think Germans like myself, always orating about your splendid freedom, felt when those itinerant clowns, Cohn and Schine, came through Germany ticking off your Foreign Service officers for their purging? Can you imagine how loud the Nazis laughed about 'the American way' of doing things?"

sb There was my French friend, exclaiming fiercely:"Do not tell me that McCarthy cares any more than Malenkov about freedom of thought--or about the future of my country."

sb There are the Roman editor and the London advertising executive who used very similar phrases to describe the timidity of conservative forces in their respective countries. "You know," said one, "one of the main drags on them in contemplating any kind of anti-Communist action is just that they all twitter and shudder with nervousness lest they get associated with McCarthyism."

sb The threads of such individual testimony weave larger truths. First and clearest of these is the fact that, except for the morbidly pleased ex-Nazis and ex-Fascists, the only Europeans who discuss the Wisconsin Senator with contented smiles are the Communists.

All U.S. leadership tends to be confused with and contaminated by the conduct of Senator McCarthy. A large part of this identification can be credited to the fact that European democrats, inevitably thinking in terms of parliamentary government, have only the dimmest understanding of the U.S. separation of executive and legislative powers. Their lack of instruction is scarcely the fault of Senator McCarthy--or President Eisenhower--but the effect is not mitigated by this. The effect is that the President and the anti-McCarthy Republicans quite often seem to horrified European onlookers like rabbits transfixed by the headlights of an onrushing truck.

The very fact that what is called "McCarthyism" is a rather elusive blur gives it a capacity to suffuse a whole national policy. As one U.S. diplomat describes it: "It is a kind of smog, discoloring all our purposes. In the thousand little things that go to make up diplomatic success or failure, it just suffices to keep the U.S. from getting the benefit of the doubt in the minds of so many. And serious decisions that often in history look so solid really amount to just that--winning the benefit of the doubt."

The public performance and fame of Senator McCarthy have succeeded, as has nothing else in modern U.S. history, in laying U.S. national behavior open to the most ludicrous caricature. Into the deadly struggle to turn back Communist aggression, to outsmart and outfight Communist parties threatening France and Italy, there suddenly seems to be injected a moment of farce, of hysteria edging on madness, when the news tickers of the world click out the report that Senator McCarthy is hot on the trail of a suspect typist trapped in the Pentagon labyrinth.

Of such unpleasant and often intangible stuff is fateful political decision made. This week, when Britain's Labor Party meets in its Scarborough conference, it faces a close and bitter division on the most urgent such decision before the West--the rearming of Germany. A Labor delegate, an advocate of German rearmament fighting fierce rank-and-file opposition, said on the eve of the conference: "Senator McCarthy may well decide this vote. All he stands for--all his identification with American policy in the eyes of average people--will force something between 500,000 and 1,000,000 votes to go against the direction in which America is trying to lead. That margin could be quite enough to decide the matter."

On the basis of such facts, a case can be made that few men in American politics have so valuably served the forces they professed to be bent on destroying. (The most obvious exception would be, of course, those American liberals who once elected to fight McCarthy, by denying the existence of Soviet espionage.)

A STAR-SPANGLED LINING

A fact which rarely occurs to us and almost certainly has never occurred to Senator McCarthy was pointed out to me by a veteran U.S. career diplomat, a man of wisdom and patience, who said:

"Until this--this thing--came on the American scene, I never realized, realized in all my brain and guts, what a banner in the sky the Stars and Stripes have been. I honestly never quite grasped how big and simple and decisive were all the things that it meant, to people, almost everywhere on earth. You know--freedom for every soul among us, justice in every court, opportunity, homes, schools, decency toward your neighbors, fairness in all things. I never realized, as I say, how people everywhere saw all this as quickly as they looked at us or thought of us. Now--that shudder of surprise and revulsion that these same people feel--it really means something more. It measures the respect, the love, the real love, we once had. Nobody else ever had it. We didn't know ourselves--and without this, few of us might ever have known that we had it so completely."

Quickened, heartfelt awareness of all implied in that truth could carry meaning far beyond the bounds of committee, beyond the U.S. Senate and beyond Washington. For, as my friend added: "We could have it all again."

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