The Nihilist

SENATOR JOE MCCARTHY (280 pp.) --Richard Rovere--Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

"A man of loose tongue, intemperate, trusting to tumult, leading the populace to mischief with empty words." That is how Euripides described the typical demagogue, and that is also how Reporter Richard Rovere sees the subject of his biography. Yet it is a measure of McCarthy's defeat that, only two years after his death, it takes an effort of the imagination to recall the shifty but haunted eyes, the spurious rhetoric, the rasping voice ("Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman! Point of order!") that could not be halted by the gavel of reason. The allusion to Euripides should not keep one from remembering that, while there was tragedy in the McCarthy era. there was comedy, too. Rovere recalls that Brooks Atkinson once blamed McCarthyism for a bad Broadway season and that a noted rabbi held the Senator's influence responsible for panty raids on college dormitories.

These two examples suggest that there was probably as much hysteria among McCarthy's foes as among his followers. In a remarkably well-balanced and even-tempered book. Author Rovere (for the past eleven years Washington correspondent for The New Yorker) notes that "McCarthyism was a bipartisan doctrine." He blames not only some Republicans for tolerating Joe so long but some Democrats (notably Senators Paul Douglas and John Kennedy) for not speaking out against him. Rovere might have added that those who did speak out against McCarthy sometimes helped him by exaggerating his importance. To Rovere himself. McCarthy remains "in many ways the most gifted demagogue" in U.S. history, with a terribly sure "access to the dark places of the American mind." But he was no totalitarian, not even a reactionary; he was a nihilist, "a revolutionist without any revolutionary vision." Anything but a conformist, he attacked the Army, the Protestant clergy, the press, the two major parties. He was, says Rovere, ''closer to the hipster than to the Organization Man."

Dead End Kid. This impression is reinforced by the physical picture--his lumbering bonhomie, his carefully cultivated 5 o'clock shadow, his habit of lying disheveled on floor or sofa, an attitude he liked to assume for photographers. "He belched in public," notes Rovere rather primly and adds: "[He had] the perverse appeal of the bum, the mucker, the Dead End kid, the James Jones-Nelson Algren-Jack Kerouac hero."

He was, of course, ruthless, utterly cynical, a fluent liar, and (in the opinion of some psychiatrists) a paranoid personality. And yet "there was to this ogreish creature a kind of innocence that may be one of the clues to his triumphs and his failures." Innocence because, as Rovere sees it, he never seriously believed in his own charges, his own cause, so that even his hatred was pretense. During Committee hearings, he could turn on his rage at will and stage a tantrum walkout just in time to get to the men's room. "McCarthy, though a demon himself, was not a man possessed by demons . . . He lacked the most necessary and awesome of demagogic gifts--a belief in the sacredness of his own mission."

Whether or not McCarthy really was as unconvinced an anti-Communist as Rovere says, he certainly was an ineffectual one, because he distracted the U.S. from more serious and urgent ways of fighting Communism. It was, says Rovere, "a flight from reality." And the flight was aided by the press. While a large section of it consistently opposed McCarthy--Rovere singles out the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, TIME Inc.. the Cowles and Knight publications--many newspapermen busily reported McCarthy's most absurd outbursts; they were prisoners of "straight reporting," the kind that is supposed to ensure impartiality as distinct from the interpretive story, which supposedly conveys prejudice.

Disturbing Memory. Rovere does not agree with the more terrified anti-Mc-Carthyites that the very institutions of U.S. society crumbled before him. Some were indeed damaged, but none were destroyed, and some were actually strengthened (i.e., the Supreme Court, which was driven to re-examine the legal "fabric of liberty"). Says he: "It was insane, looney, and ghastly, but it did not mean that the free human spirit had collapsed." Nevertheless, Revere remains disturbed by a 1954 Gallup poll that reported 50% of the people favorably disposed toward McCarthy. There is no guarantee, he warns, that a similar aberration might not trouble America again.

What Rovere fails to make fully clear in an otherwise impressive book is the background of McCarthyism--the sudden discovery of Communism by masses of Americans, and the equally sudden realization that intelligent and responsible men had for decades treated Communism as a progressive force. Historians may reckon it a tribute to the resilience of U.S. democracy that such a sense of discovery and betrayal, in near war times, led to nothing worse. "McCarthy offered a powerful challenge to freedom," says Rovere, "and he showed us to be more vulnerable than many had guessed to a seditious demagogy--as well as less vulnerable than some of us feared."

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