Tail Gunner Joe

Over the course of this year, the centenary of William F. Buckley’s birth, we will republish an article by him weekly. This week’s piece offers a corrective regarding the left’s overexuberance in its condemnation and recollections of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communism.

In the late Fifties, Richard Rovere published a book on the late Senator Joe McCarthy which was greeted as deliriously as Lillian Heilman’s recent book, Scoundrel Time, the implicit thesis of which is that anybody who thought ill of Josef Stalin before she did, which was some time after he died, was, well, a scoundrel. Rovere’s book was called “a brilliant essay in contemporary history” by Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “one of the most distinguished political documents of the year” by Eric Goldman; and, by Walter Lippmann himself, “the definitive job . . . I can’t imagine what else there is to say about him.”