Books in Brief: Joe McCarthy and the Press

Joe McCarthy and the Press, by Edwin R. Bayley (University of Wisconsin Press, 270 pp., $16.50).

Edwin R. Bayley, during his years as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, was singled out in a crowd by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy one memorable evening and introduced as follows: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like first to introduce a reporter in the audience, Ed Bayley from the Milwaukee Daily Worker. Stand up, Ed, and let the people see what a Communist looks like.” Thirty years have elapsed since that incident took place, and Mr. Bayley—now a sedate academic type in charge of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley—has written a book called Joe McCarthy and the Press. You’d tend to think that Mr. Bayley’s book should probably be approached with a certain discretion, and to some extent you’d be right; but Edwin Bayley, like Elizabeth Drew, makes a point of getting his facts straight before stirring in his own opinions, and so Joe McCarthy and the Press also turns out to be a fascinating, carefully documented study of the peculiar relationship between the Junior Senator from Wisconsin and the men who so assiduously chronicled his days of notoriety. The Senator’s periodic bouts of fabulism are, of course, retailed at length, but so are the manifold sins of the contemporary press—and these, not surprisingly, make for far more interesting reading. Mr. Bayley, for instance, casts a cold eye on the New York Post’s 17-part series “The One-Man Mob of Joe McCarthy” (1951): “The series,” he writes, “was a highly emotional but remarkably thorough compilation of everything unsavory that had been dug up about McCarthy’s past.” In his discussion of Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 See It Now broadcast on McCarthy, he scrupulously reminds us that both Gilbert Seldes and Jack Gould expressed serious reservations about the propriety of the See It Now team’s editing techniques. And his chapter on the wire services vividly suggests Malcolm Muggeridge’s icy dictum: “A Beatrice Webb or George Orwell deceive themselves; journalists are paid to deceive others. To succeed in their profession, they must get on to the front page, the way to which, more often than not, is paved with bad intentions.” One somehow doubts that Mr. Bayley’s purpose was to inspire such heretical reflections, but these things happen. Connoisseurs of inadvertent humor, by the way, will relish the following sentence to be found on page 160: “McCarthyism gave us Mary McGrory.” Say it ain’t so, Joe.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

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Joe McCarthy and the Press, by Edwin R. Bayley (University of Wisconsin Press, 270 pp., $16.50).

Edwin R. Bayley, during his years as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, was singled out in a crowd by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy one memorable evening and introduced as follows: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like first to introduce a reporter in the audience, Ed Bayley from the Milwaukee Daily Worker. Stand up, Ed, and let the people see what a Communist looks like.” Thirty years have elapsed since that incident took place, and Mr. Bayley—now a sedate academic type in charge of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley—has written a book called Joe McCarthy and the Press. You’d tend to think that Mr. Bayley’s book should probably be approached with a certain discretion, and to some extent you’d be right; but Edwin Bayley, like Elizabeth Drew, makes a point of getting his facts straight before stirring in his own opinions, and so Joe McCarthy and the Press also turns out to be a fascinating, carefully documented study of the peculiar relationship between the Junior Senator from Wisconsin and the men who so assiduously chronicled his days of notoriety. The Senator’s periodic bouts of fabulism are, of course, retailed at length, but so are the manifold sins of the contemporary press—and these, not surprisingly, make for far more interesting reading. Mr. Bayley, for instance, casts a cold eye on the New York Post’s 17-part series “The One-Man Mob of Joe McCarthy” (1951): “The series,” he writes, “was a highly emotional but remarkably thorough compilation of everything unsavory that had been dug up about McCarthy’s past.” In his discussion of Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 See It Now broadcast on McCarthy, he scrupulously reminds us that both Gilbert Seldes and Jack Gould expressed serious reservations about the propriety of the See It Now team’s editing techniques. And his chapter on the wire services vividly suggests Malcolm Muggeridge’s icy dictum: “A Beatrice Webb or George Orwell deceive themselves; journalists are paid to deceive others. To succeed in their profession, they must get on to the front page, the way to which, more often than not, is paved with bad intentions.” One somehow doubts that Mr. Bayley’s purpose was to inspire such heretical reflections, but these things happen. Connoisseurs of inadvertent humor, by the way, will relish the following sentence to be found on page 160: “McCarthyism gave us Mary McGrory.” Say it ain’t so, Joe.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.