"You wanna know what my vision is?"

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/herman-mccarthy.html

Books The New York Times


INTRODUCTION

Joseph McCarthy

Reexaming the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator

By ARTHUR HERMAN

Free Press

Read the Review

When I walked into the mall in downtown Appleton, Wisconsin, on a late and lazy Sunday morning, I had no address for the place I was going. I didn't even know the name of the cemetery. The idea for doing this had come to me while my wife and I were flying to Wisconsin to visit my parents. Sitting in Chicago's O'Hare Airport during those heavy, boring moments before boarding our plane, I had suddenly decided that while I was out here, I should visit Joe McCarthy's grave.

Since I was writing a book on him, it seemed only fitting to pay a visit. It was also the fortieth anniversary of his death — a lifetime ago in my case. I was barely five months old when McCarthy had been buried on May 7, 1957, in his home town of Appleton. In one sense he has never been laid to rest. Joe McCarthy was and remains the single most despised man in American political memory — far more reviled than Aaron Burr or Richard Nixon or even George Wallace. Yet I knew that some people treat his grave as a kind of shrine. The John Birch Society, the final word in right-wing extremism and anti-Communist paranoia, made its home in Appleton — keeping vigil, as it were, beside the fallen hero's tomb (although their offices are actually in a strip mall on the other side of town). One biographer, David Oshinsky, had published a picture of McCarthy's grave strewn with flowers from well-wishers. Thanks to the Oshinsky photo, I had an idea what the headstone looked like. My problem, since I hadn't brought any of my notes with me, was to find out exactly where it was.

McCarthy's grave. A shrine to die-hard supporters. A milestone of justice to his enemies. ("Joe McCarthy's death," Daniel Boorstin had growled to me when we had had lunch at the Cosmos Club a few weeks earlier, "isn't that the fifth proof for the existence of God?") The term enemies seems harsh for describing McCarthy's detractors and critics more than forty years after his death. But the bald truth is that the term does capture the spirit of their attacks, both then and now. "Senator McCarthy died yesterday in Washington," wrote the English newspaper News Chronicle in May 1957. "America was the cleaner by his fall, and is cleaner by his death." When Richard Rovere would publish his dark masterpiece, Senator Joe McCarthy, two years later, he asserted that, "like Hitler, McCarthy was a screamer, a political thug, a master of the mob," and that he "usurped executive and judicial authority whenever the fancy struck him." As for McCarthy's supporters, "the bat-haunted Minute Women of the U.S.A., to the Texas millionaires, to the China Lobby, to the 'hard' anti-Communist intelligentsia of New York," they came to McCarthy "from the outmost fringes, where grievances and anxieties were the strongest and the least grounded in reason; where the passion for authoritarian leadership was greatest; where the will to hate and condemn and punish could most easily be transformed into political action."

Rovere was a journalist and the quintessential liberal anti-Communist of that era. He despised the vicious and narrow-minded totalitarian spirit communism represented, but he and other liberals thought they saw the same spirit among their fellow Americans on the political right. McCarthyism was part of "a popular revolt against the upper classes," as Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons put it, and Rovere for one had no doubt about which side he himself was on. He had written a series of devastating pieces on McCarthy for the New Yorker and had crossed swords with him more than once. Yet he did not for a moment believe that his own personal involvement in those events disqualified him from passing historical judgment on the era or the man. Joe McCarthy, Rovere concluded, had never actually believed in the monstrous crusade he had set in motion; anticommunism, patriotism, the Catholic church, were all tools for self-promotion, never sacred causes. "To McCarthy, everything was profane." He had some decent instincts — "who doesn't?" Rovere had to add — but "in the mirror, McCarthy must have seen and recognized a fraud."

Have more recent commentators changed their perspective? Try William O'Neill (in American High: The Years of Confidence 1945-1960): "Dishonesty was the best policy to McCarthy until the bitter end." Or John Patrick Diggins: "A consummate demagogue, McCarthy played upon cold war emotions and made charges so fantastic that frightened people believed the worst." Or Michael Barone: "McCarthy was a pathological liar, an uninformed and obscure politician with certain demagogic gifts" (that classic word again, the favorite for describing McCarthy's rapport with his constituents). Or Paul Johnson (in Modern Times): "He was not a serious politician but an adventurer, who treated politics as a game." Or, David Halberstam (in The Fifties): "He instinctively knew how to brush aside the protests of his witnesses, how to humiliate vulnerable, scared people. In the end, he produced little beyond fear and headlines."

Even those who have belatedly recognized that some of what McCarthy said and did had genuine merit cannot resist joining in. In a 1996 piece that appeared in the Washington Post, provocatively titled "Was McCarthy Right About the Left," Nicholas von Hoffman acknowledged that McCarthy's charges did rest against a background of genuine Communist subversion and of liberal excuses for it, but still felt it necessary to add that he was "a loutish, duplicitous bully, who carried, not the names of Reds but bottles of hootch in his briefcase." And in their careful, painstaking summary of new evidence about the Communist Party of the United States taken from Soviet archives, which definitively shows that it was secretly financed by the Soviet Union and helped to support the KGB's espionage activities, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr were quick to add, "None of this, however, offers any vindication for Senator McCarthy, or McCarthyism" — a judgment I will leave to readers to assess by the time they finish this book.

In short, McCarthy remains what the Germans would call vogelfrei — the "free bird" everyone and anyone is free to take a shot at, even forty years after his death. Today he exists in most people's imagination almost solely as an established icon of evil. In fact, when people learned that I was doing a biography of McCarthy, a standard response was, "Who are you going to write about next? Adolf Hitler?"

In retrospect, McCarthy's disgrace and obloquy has come at a certain price to historical truth. He has become so taboo a figure, someone presented only in Rovere-style caricature rather than flesh and blood, that confusion and ignorance about what he did and the times in which he operated are widespread. Books like David Caute's The Great Fear, which implicitly compared the anti-Communist crusade of the fifties to Stalin's Great Terror, or Ellen Schrecker's Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, can portray the entire period in the most terrifyingly nightmarish colors, and be believed. So part of dispelling the myths about Joe McCarthy has to include dispelling the myths about the 1950s and the so-called red scare.

We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947 to 1958, no American citizens were interrogated without benefit of legal counsel, none was arrested or detained without due judicial process, and no one went to jail without trial. As George Kennan, no admirer of the investigations, stated, "Whoever could get his case before a court was generally assured of meeting there with a level of justice no smaller than at any time in recent American history." All through the "worst" of the McCarthy period, the Communist Party itself was never outlawed, membership in the party was never declared a crime, and it continued to maintain public offices, publish books and the Daily Worker, and recruit new members (admittedly a tough sell by then).

In fact, most of what people ordinarily mean when they talk about the "red scare" — the House Un-American Activities Committee; anti-Communist probes into Hollywood, labor unions, and America's schools and universities; the Rosenberg trial; blacklisting in the media and schoolteachers fired for disloyalty — had nothing to do with McCarthy and he had nothing to do with them (although when asked, he generally approved of them, as most other Americans did). McCarthy's own committee in the Senate, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he chaired for less than two years, had a specific duty to investigate communism in the federal government and among government employees. It had done so before he became chairman, and it did so after he left, under Senator John McClellan and Bobby Kennedy. The men and women McCarthy targeted, rightly or wrongly, as Communists or Communist sympathizers all shared that single characteristic: they were federal employees and public servants, and therefore, McCarthy and his supporters argued, they ought be held accountable to a higher standard than other American citizens.

That fact tends to get lost when historians dwell exclusively on the stories of harassment, professional disgrace, and other indignities suffered as a result of McCarthy's and other anti-Communist investigations. Dalton Trumbo, Dashiell Hammett, Howard Fast, Paul Robeson, Steve Nelson, Frances Farmer, and Lillian Hellman appear in standard treatments of the period in the same way in which the names of martyrs grace the pages of histories of the early church. Their personal ordeals are constantly presented as proof that America in those days must have been in the grip of an anti-Communist hysteria and a "witch-hunt." (In order not to be left out, Hellman told her own tale of woe in a short book of breathtaking dishonesty, entitled Scoundrel Time.) The best and most generous estimate is that during the entire decade of the red scare, ten thousand Americans lost their jobs because of their past or present affiliation with the Communist Party or one of its auxiliary organizations. Of those who lost their jobs, two thousand worked in the government, and in perhaps forty cases McCarthy himself was directly or indirectly responsible for their being fired. In only one case — that of Owen Lattimore — can anyone make the argument that McCarthy's allegations led to any actual legal proceedings, and there a judge eventually threw out most of the indictment. Paradoxically, the fact that McCarthy never sent anyone to prison is also turned against him; opponents claimed that during his entire career, he never actually exposed a single spy or Communist — a claim that is manifestly untrue, as we will see.

In fact, the number of people who did spend time in prison remained small. A grand total of 108 Communist Party members were convicted under the antisubversion provisions of the Smith Act, which Congress passed in 1941 (long before McCarthy was a member) and applied as equally to Nazi and fascist organizations as it did to Communists. Another twenty Communist Party members were imprisoned under state and local laws. Fewer than a dozen Americans went to jail for espionage activities (one of them being Alger Hiss, who was convicted of perjury). Exactly two were sentenced to death for conspiracy to commit espionage: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

We need to contrast all this with the three and a half million people who, according to the KGB's own official numbers, were arrested and sent to the gulag during the six years of Stalin's Great Terror, from 1935 to 1941. None had the benefit of any genuine legal protection; Stalin's secret police seized, interrogated, and sentenced the lot. The KGB states that of that number, 681,692 were executed in 1937-1938 alone. Taken with the four or five million people who died in Stalin's Great Famine of 1932-1933, the total number of human beings executed, exiled, imprisoned, or starved to death in those years comes to ten to eleven million. These are official KGB numbers released at the end of the cold war. They are almost certainly low. And during all the years when this was taking place, men and women like Trumbo, Robeson, and Hellman insisted that Stalin was the just and compassionate father of his people, asserted that Soviet citizens enjoyed a freedom and happiness unknown in American society, and celebrated the Soviet Union as the model society for the future. Others, such as Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon, Martin Sobell, and Steve Nelson, willingly served the Stalinist regime, as other espionage agents or as part of the Communist underground apparatus.

In the 1970s, it became fashionable to deny or at least avoid mentioning this part of the historical context in which McCarthy lived and breathed. If McCarthy was guilty, the reasoning goes, then those he tormented must be innocent. David Oshinsky could publish a 597-page biography of McCarthy that contained exactly one and a half pages on the Communist Party. As late as 1994, in The Era of McCarthyism, Ellen Schrecker could dismiss the charge that Julius Rosenberg gave atomic secrets to the Soviets as "uncertain," and present the Rosenbergs' conviction and execution in 1951 as just another example of anti-Communist hysteria.

Today we know better. Archival materials from the former Soviet Union have revealed that Stalin's intentions were aggressively malign and expansionist, just as America's coldest cold warriors had believed. We now know that Mao Tse-tung was not a progressive nationalist forced into the Soviet camp by American hostility and incomprehension, as revisionist scholars in the seventies like to pretend, but was a brutal and dedicated Communist who enthusiastically embraced Stalin from the beginning. Historians J. E. Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Ronald Radosh, Allan Weinstein, and Alexander Vassiliev have used new declassified American materials as well as Soviet sources to lay to rest any doubts about the Soviet Union's espionage activities, as well as the Communist Party's active support of it.

The declassified Venona decrypts have revealed to the public the full extent and depth of Soviet spying in America and proved that fears of Russian espionage networks at work in the highest reaches of the government were not fantasy but sober fact.










http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/us/politics/disillusioned-in-iraq-but-prodded-to-serve-again.html?partner=EXCITE&ei=5043&_r=0

The New York Times


Disillusioned in Iraq, but Prodded to Serve Again

By JEREMY W. PETERS FEB. 8, 2015

WASHINGTON — Representative Seth Moulton could have gone off to graduate school with many of his Harvard classmates. Instead, a few months before Sept. 11, 2001, he joined the Marines.










http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prodded

Dictionary.com


prod

verb (used with object), prodded, prodding.

1. to poke or jab with or as if with something pointed:

I prodded him with my elbow.

2. to rouse or incite as if by poking; nag; goad.










http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Moulton


Seth Moulton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seth Wilbur Moulton (born October 24, 1978) is an American former Marine Corps officer, a member of the Democratic Party, and the member of the U.S. Representatives for Massachusetts's 6th congressional district.

After graduating from Harvard University in 2001 with a Bachelor of Science in physics, Moulton joined the United States Marine Corps. He served four tours in the Iraq War and between those tours earned his master's degrees in business and public administration in a dual program at Harvard University.

He entered politics in 2014, running for Massachusetts's 6th congressional district. He defeated incumbent Congressman John F. Tierney in the Democratic primary and then defeated former State Senator and 2012 nominee Richard Tisei in the general election.


Military career

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Moulton led of one of the first infantry platoons to enter Baghdad.










http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068152/taglines

IMDb


$ (1971)

Taglines


The BIG bank-heist is on!





http://emanuellevy.com/review/dollars-1971-starring-warren-beatty/

EMANUELLEVY


Dollars–$ (1971): Starring Warren Beatty


Opened at the Loew’s State and Tower East Theatres, New York, December 15, 1971.



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 06:34 AM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Monday 09 February 2015