“Smear and Unsupported Charges”

While he lived, one knew but couldn’t prove that many of Senator McCarthy’s critics were moved by something deeper and much uglier than their overt political differences with him. One knew it because of how they performed off-the-record; at a dinner party, for example, where their conversation revealed compulsive, unreasoning hatreds that made serious discussion of him impossible. One couldn’t prove it because the libel laws bade them hold their tongues in public. But now he is dead and anything goes. Richard Rovere first let loose a grisly slander, which Esquire published on the anniversary of his death, asserting that McCarthy drank himself to death—as witness that he was to be seen “lurching” down the Senate corridors in the last days. (Actually, the “lurch” was due to a steel brace clamped to an enormously painful right leg.) This season Rovere has delivered himself of a full-length book, Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt, Brace, $3.95), which purports to be an historical portrait of the man and his era, but which, in fact, is valuable only as evidence of what happens to an otherwise civilized Liberal reporter when he touches It.

As political history, this book is, simply, trash. For one thing, Rovere depends on the sort of rhetorical vulgarisms that automatically disqualify for serious history. McCarthy was a “cheap politician,” “guttersnipe,” “seditionist,” “crook,” “foul-mouthed,” a “bum,” “mucker,” “liar”—”He lied with wild abandon… he lied in his teeth and in the teeth of the truth; he lied vividly and with a bold imagination; he lied, often, with very little pretense to be telling the truth”—“ranter,” “screamer,” “faker,” “ogre,” “rattlesnake”: I gave up on this compilation half way through the book.

LB

About the Author

L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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While he lived, one knew but couldn’t prove that many of Senator McCarthy’s critics were moved by something deeper and much uglier than their overt political differences with him. One knew it because of how they performed off-the-record; at a dinner party, for example, where their conversation revealed compulsive, unreasoning hatreds that made serious discussion of him impossible. One couldn’t prove it because the libel laws bade them hold their tongues in public. But now he is dead and anything goes. Richard Rovere first let loose a grisly slander, which Esquire published on the anniversary of his death, asserting that McCarthy drank himself to death—as witness that he was to be seen “lurching” down the Senate corridors in the last days. (Actually, the “lurch” was due to a steel brace clamped to an enormously painful right leg.) This season Rovere has delivered himself of a full-length book, Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt, Brace, $3.95), which purports to be an historical portrait of the man and his era, but which, in fact, is valuable only as evidence of what happens to an otherwise civilized Liberal reporter when he touches It.

As political history, this book is, simply, trash. For one thing, Rovere depends on the sort of rhetorical vulgarisms that automatically disqualify for serious history. McCarthy was a “cheap politician,” “guttersnipe,” “seditionist,” “crook,” “foul-mouthed,” a “bum,” “mucker,” “liar”—”He lied with wild abandon… he lied in his teeth and in the teeth of the truth; he lied vividly and with a bold imagination; he lied, often, with very little pretense to be telling the truth”—“ranter,” “screamer,” “faker,” “ogre,” “rattlesnake”: I gave up on this compilation half way through the book.