National Review and the Bush Administration Still Heart Joe McCarthy

In case anyone thinks that National Review's love of Joe McCarthy is something generations in the past. It is not. And the same applies to the Republican right more broadly. Senior Bush policymaker Eliot Abrams wrote in National Review praising McCarthy only last decade. Here's what I think, hoisted from the archives:

Eliott Abrams Identifies Himself with Joe McCarthy: Eliott Abrams, "McCarthyism Reconsidered," National Review February 26, 1996, pp. 57-60. [A review of the reissue of William McCarthy and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies (Regnery).]

To read Eliott Abrams's review of Buckley and Bozell's McCarthy and His Enemies is to enter a strange and inverted world. One learns that the issue at stake in the fight over Senator Joe McCarthy was not whether General of the Army, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense George Marshall was a Maoist traitor, or whether there actually were 57 card-carrying Communists in the State Department--that is a left-wing delusion that distorts what the fight over Senator Joe McCarthy was about.

Instead, according to Eliott Abrams, the key issue in assessing Joe McCarthy was "whether the State Department was running its security program well or poorly." Moreover, in order to show that the State Department was running its security policy poorly, Senator McCarthy did not need to demonstrate that there were spies in the State Department. Instead, all he needed to do was to "show that there was some evidence that an employee was a security or loyalty risk--present "enough evidence to raise reasonable doubt as to whether all loyalty and security risks had been removed from the State Department."... Never mind that George Marshall was not a Maoist traitor, or that there were not 57 card-carrying Communists in the State Department. After all, "McCarthy was in a business that permitted a certain latitude," "politics, not physics." Abrams quotes with approval Buckley and Bozell's statements that "McCarthy's record is... not only much better than his critics allege, but, given his metier, extremely good," and that McCarthy "should not be remembered as the man who didn't produce 57 Communist Party cards but as the man who brought public pressure to bear on the State Department to revise its practices and to eliminate from responsible positions flagrant security risks."...

[Thus Cohen] praise[s] Buckley and Bozell for standing up to liberal anti-McCarthyite hysteria:

At precisely the moment of greatest hysteria, Buckley and Bozell insisted on clarity of thought and moral purpose. The intellectual standards they upheld here do them honor four decades later, not least because so many in the academic and intellectual elites were happy to compromise those standards in the interest of "democratic centralism." The book remains of lasting value not so much for its factual accounts or its political reasoning, but because of its moral stance.

Now this is a startling inversion of the way... it really happened. The hysteria--traitors in the cabinet, large cells of card-carrying Communists making foreign policy--was McCarthy's. The honor and moral purpose were those of McCarthy's political opponents.... So how does Eliott Abrams account for the fact that history's--strongly negative--judgment of Joe McCarthy is so wildly divergent from Abrams's--strongly positive judgment? I think the key is found in a long passage two-thirds of the way through [Cohen's] review....

As [Whittaker] Chambers had predicted, [Joseph] McCarthy's blunders became capital crimes for which his cause would be punished. His opponents' capital crimes became blunders that were not newsworthy. Thus the many hearings about McCarthy focused not on whether State Department procedures really were adequate, but first on whether McCarthy had offered legally persuasive proof that Mr. X and Mrs. Y were indeed espionage agents, and then on whether McCarthy was behaving himself.... [I]t was in the McCarthy era that the iron triangle of liberal bureaucrats, a liberal press, and liberal Democrats in control of Congress was first evident.... But from the early 1950s on, the pattern unveiled in the McCarthy era reigned supreme, reaching its apotheosis in the Watergate and Iran/Contra hearings...

But [for Abrams] to call a McCarthy opponent (albeit a cowardly one) like Dwight Eisenhower a "liberal" is very strange indeed.

Abrams concludes his review of Buckley and Bozell with:

So perhaps the optimism of this book, the hope that moral and factual argument could sway men's minds, was correct.... History is opening its files and revealing the true nature and extent of Communist activity in the United States.... At precisely the moment of greatest hysteria, Buckley and Bozell insisted on clarity of thought and moral purpose. The intellectual standards they upheld here do them honor four decades later.... The book remains of lasting value not so much for its factual accounts or its political reasoning, but because of its moral stance.... Regnery's first printing of this new edition of McCarthy and His Enemies has already sold out. That "historical rectification" may be nearer than we think.

The defense of Joe McCarthy as a "moral stance": amazing.