Those who, during the McCarthy era, protested the loose charge of Communism were often strangely unscandalized when the supposed ‘‘slander” turned out to be true. Those who leaped to the defense of Alger Hiss (convicted weeks before McCarthy’s “inaugural” at Wheeling) evinced little sense of betrayal later when a jury found him guilty of perjury; on the contrary, many of them seem to have been fortified in their faith and devotion. Today Hiss and other alleged Communists (and let us waive the question which, if any, of them were guilty) are widely presumed to have been victims merely in virtue of their having been accused. This is strong evidence that the real issue in the McCarthy era was never the verdict, but the accusation itself. There was, and remains, an anti-McCarthy sect whose unstated principal tenet is that the (hostile) imputation of Communism is a priori false. And this form of anti-anti-Communism is among the most respectable political bigotries of the day, which is why the champions of Hiss and the Rosenbergs quickly invoke the detested name of McCarthy, with all its repellent force: his mere mention effects a sort of magical exoneration-by-dissociation. (Nixon’s name now has a similar potency in conjuration: at Princeton recently, Hiss defender John Chabot Smith insinuated that Allen Weinstein, whose researches have convinced him of Hiss’s guilt, was a Nixon minion.)
A good account of the period is Lately Thomas’ When Even Angels Wept, which supplements its brisk narrative with a comically overwrought editorial chorus drawn largely from the contemporary comments of The New Republic and The Nation. It was The Nation whose specialty was divining McCarthy’s motives: it found him to be animated by Hitlerite ambitions and plans, and confidently surmised that he had even scheduled major surgery for political effect.
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