Dé·jà vu?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 9, 2020
Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1908-1957) successfully ran for the U.S. Senate in Wisconsin in 1946, defeating Robert M. La Follette, Jr.
After three largely undistinguished years in the Senate, McCarthy rose suddenly to national fame in February 1950, when he asserted in a speech that he had a list of "members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" who were employed in the State Department. Alger Hiss was prominent on that list, who denied being a communist until his death, but records thereafter indicated that he was, indeed, a communist and had access to the most sensitive documents in the Truman Administration.
In succeeding years after that 1950 speech, McCarthy made additional accusations of Communist infiltration into the State Department, the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voice of America, and the US Army. He was blustery and often spoke off the cuff with no central theme to his accusations, but said with such blatant confidence and theatrical vigor that people came to wonder if the senator did not in fact have a point to his argument, an argument that never seemed to have legs.
He also used various charges of communism, communist sympathies, disloyalty, or sex crimes to attack a number of politicians and other individuals inside and outside of government. This included a concurrent “Lavender Scare” against suspected homosexuals; as homosexuality was prohibited by law at the time.
It was also perceived to increase a person's risk for blackmail. Former US Senator Alan K. Simpson has written: "The so-called 'Red Scare' has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element ... and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals."
With the highly publicized Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year, McCarthy's support and popularity commence to fade.
Already infamous for his aggressive interrogations of suspected Communists, the Wisconsin Senator earned more notoriety via televised Congressional hearings in 1954.
McCarthy turned the target of his investigations in the army’s lack of security, but the army in turn charged him with using improper influence to win preferential treatment for a former staff member, Pvt. G. David Schine.
When Senator McCarthy attempted to emphasize army negligence with regard to a low ranking US Army enlisted man, implying that this man was a communist and that lawyer Joseph Welch had Communist ties without a scintilla of evidence, Joseph Welch delivered his now famous retort, “Senator McCarthy, have you no sense of decency; no sense of shame?” Although McCarthy was acquitted of malfeasance, his popular support waned and his political career was soon over.
The Army-McCarthy hearings dominated national television from April to June 1954. A subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations was seeking to learn whether Senator McCarthy had used improper influence to win preferential treatment for Pvt. G. David Schine, a former member of the senator’s staff who had been drafted. McCarthy countercharged that the army was trying to derail his embarrassing investigations of army security practices through blackmail and and intimidation.
The congressional hearings were among the first to be televised, and they captured national attention because of McCarthy’s notoriety. The camera made clear his methods and manner, greatly weakening his popular support and leading to his censure by the Senate on December 2, 1954.
The word McCarthyism has become synonymous with the practice of publicizing accusations of treason and disloyalty with insufficient evidence.
On December 2, 1954, the Senate did vote to censure Senator McCarthy by a vote of 67–22, making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion. He continued to speak against communism and socialism until his death at the age of 48 at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland on May 2, 1957. His death certificate listed the cause of death as "hepatitis, acute, cause unknown.” Doctors had not previously reported him to be in critical condition. Some biographers say his death was caused or exacerbated by alcoholism. What was however undisputable, Joseph Raymond McCarthy died a broken man.
In my long life, I’ve never seen a spectacle to match what I have seen for the nearly four years of the Donald J. Trump presidency. Vitriolic hate and contempt for the president has been so visceral and so diabolical that sometimes I feel as if this is the 13th century and the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
That said, like the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph Raymond McCarthy, who played into his hater’s hands a half century ago, President Trump has never been able to control his tweets or his mouth, registering inconsistent banter that confuses his most loyal of supporters while providing unimaginable ammunition to his detractors.
One thing is certain. He is going to lose the election, and it might be by an embarrassing margin. By the temper of the times, he is running against a "do nothing" nice guy who will be the oldest president in United States history, if elected, and there is little doubt that we will have our first female president sometime soon, and she will be a person of color. I find her intelligent, attractive, engaging and energetic, but I don’t like her politics as I am a conservative, and have been all my adult life, At my stage of life, I am not likely to suffer for a socialistic society, but my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who are now approaching a score of Americans surely will.
President Trump seemingly had the right idea during his first thousand days of putting the nation back to work, dropping unemployment lower than I can remember it being, getting Europe to pay for its own defense; reminding the United Nations and the World Health Organization that we could not carry them financially, alone, and confronting China for its stealing our patented intelligence and putting our commerce in a trade deficit that led to a Trade War.
Yes, there is Putin and the common thread of thought that Trump loves despots. This is edgy because I think he loves people who are “in charge,” and despots often are, and he hates governments that expect to be carried, and the list of such nations is legion.
When it comes to Trump as a businessman, what the common every day citizens doesn’t realize and is not interested in knowing is that the best of our corporations are often flying by the seat of their pants with monumental cash flow problems, problems that they not only keep from stockholders and Wall Street, but from the most intimate members of their staff.
Years ago I wrote on Enron for the Executive Excellence magazine and for The Journal for Organizational Excellence. Hardly a more pathetic case of high level jinx and consummate fraud can be matched. But if you read Enron’s history, the corporation sucked itself into believing its lies, what Leon Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.”
If you think that is unusual, CBS “Sixty Minutes” had a segment in which a woman executive had all her degrees on the wall, all of them bogus, and she allowed herself to be interviewed, talking convincingly but absurdly that she did graduate from these universities when in fact she hadn’t attended a single class. The human mind can play tricks on us, and the corporate mind can kill us jobwise and health wise when it believes its own lies.
President Trump, who has done several remarkable things during his traumatic term of office, didn’t need the coronavirus to totally discombobulate him, but it has. The monkey shows we saw daily early on, intended to calm our national anxieties relating to the virus, and to give us the reassurance that progress was being made to contain the virus, with CDC scientists in attendance, but with the Donald as the MC of the show, were in retrospect a little like the McCarthy Congressional Hearings, comedic and equally tragic.
It was as if we had learned nothing with the inept manner with which progress in the Vietnam War had been measured, at least for the American public’s consumption, by presenting body counts daily of the number of the Vietcong dead as reassurance that we were winning this $trillion war.
Likewise, nightly state and national news programs of the diminishing number of coronavirus cases and deaths makes for impressive graphs of statistical summaries of the day, which have the ring of science but like Vietnam, are quite deceiving.
Point of fact, unlike WWII, the American people have not considered this war, their war.
I’m now going back to a point mentioned earlier about cognitive dissonance, but in this sense the focus is on how much we as ordinary citizens rely on symbolic data and symbolic performance.
Presence is a symbolic characteristic as is charisma neither of which has anything to do with competence much less intelligence. Presence and symbolism have had an amazing appeal to ordinary Americans. Consequently, we are guided as much as if not more by symbolism and charisma than we are guided by competence. This is scary.
Presence and charisma have little to do with corporate power when you are the only show in town as Donald Trump once was for many years as a businessman. He lost his shirt in the casinos of Atlantic City, but treated that role, as it turns out, mainly as an absentee landowner, and so he went under. But so did the whole of Atlantic City as Native American Indians came into the casino picture implanting their group culture approach.
When I was working in South Africa and part of a young affluent crowd, one young man, who came from British South African wealth, and who considered himself the quintessential businessman, said to me one day, “Jim, if the world turned itself over to us, there would be a level of economic growth and harmony never known before by man.” I thought he was full of sauce then, but now I’ve watched what a totally business perspective has done to our country, which incidentally, is not the Republican way, but that is another story for another time.
I am writing this because I fear that the Donald will not only lose the election, but perhaps as badly as Senator Walter Mondale lost it to Richard Nixon in 1972 with the largest margin of victory in the Electoral College for a Republican in a US presidential election.
Senator McCarthy turned to booze and self-disgust after being censured by his US Senate colleagues, and died at 48.
We are all of a terribly fragile construction but we don’t like to hear about that. When what other people think of us, no matter how legitimate their justification, it is what we think of ourselves that truly matters. And when it is more important to have friends and colleagues who believe in us rather than for us to be our own best friend and believe in ourselves, we can be easily crushed like an inanimate bug. I pray this doesn’t happen to our president because I think he is not such a bad guy, but just happens to be his own worst enemy.
After three largely undistinguished years in the Senate, McCarthy rose suddenly to national fame in February 1950, when he asserted in a speech that he had a list of "members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" who were employed in the State Department. Alger Hiss was prominent on that list, who denied being a communist until his death, but records thereafter indicated that he was, indeed, a communist and had access to the most sensitive documents in the Truman Administration.
In succeeding years after that 1950 speech, McCarthy made additional accusations of Communist infiltration into the State Department, the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voice of America, and the US Army. He was blustery and often spoke off the cuff with no central theme to his accusations, but said with such blatant confidence and theatrical vigor that people came to wonder if the senator did not in fact have a point to his argument, an argument that never seemed to have legs.
He also used various charges of communism, communist sympathies, disloyalty, or sex crimes to attack a number of politicians and other individuals inside and outside of government. This included a concurrent “Lavender Scare” against suspected homosexuals; as homosexuality was prohibited by law at the time.
It was also perceived to increase a person's risk for blackmail. Former US Senator Alan K. Simpson has written: "The so-called 'Red Scare' has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element ... and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals."
With the highly publicized Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year, McCarthy's support and popularity commence to fade.
Already infamous for his aggressive interrogations of suspected Communists, the Wisconsin Senator earned more notoriety via televised Congressional hearings in 1954.
McCarthy turned the target of his investigations in the army’s lack of security, but the army in turn charged him with using improper influence to win preferential treatment for a former staff member, Pvt. G. David Schine.
When Senator McCarthy attempted to emphasize army negligence with regard to a low ranking US Army enlisted man, implying that this man was a communist and that lawyer Joseph Welch had Communist ties without a scintilla of evidence, Joseph Welch delivered his now famous retort, “Senator McCarthy, have you no sense of decency; no sense of shame?” Although McCarthy was acquitted of malfeasance, his popular support waned and his political career was soon over.
The Army-McCarthy hearings dominated national television from April to June 1954. A subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations was seeking to learn whether Senator McCarthy had used improper influence to win preferential treatment for Pvt. G. David Schine, a former member of the senator’s staff who had been drafted. McCarthy countercharged that the army was trying to derail his embarrassing investigations of army security practices through blackmail and and intimidation.
The congressional hearings were among the first to be televised, and they captured national attention because of McCarthy’s notoriety. The camera made clear his methods and manner, greatly weakening his popular support and leading to his censure by the Senate on December 2, 1954.
The word McCarthyism has become synonymous with the practice of publicizing accusations of treason and disloyalty with insufficient evidence.
On December 2, 1954, the Senate did vote to censure Senator McCarthy by a vote of 67–22, making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion. He continued to speak against communism and socialism until his death at the age of 48 at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland on May 2, 1957. His death certificate listed the cause of death as "hepatitis, acute, cause unknown.” Doctors had not previously reported him to be in critical condition. Some biographers say his death was caused or exacerbated by alcoholism. What was however undisputable, Joseph Raymond McCarthy died a broken man.
Dé·jà vu?
In my long life, I’ve never seen a spectacle to match what I have seen for the nearly four years of the Donald J. Trump presidency. Vitriolic hate and contempt for the president has been so visceral and so diabolical that sometimes I feel as if this is the 13th century and the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
That said, like the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph Raymond McCarthy, who played into his hater’s hands a half century ago, President Trump has never been able to control his tweets or his mouth, registering inconsistent banter that confuses his most loyal of supporters while providing unimaginable ammunition to his detractors.
One thing is certain. He is going to lose the election, and it might be by an embarrassing margin. By the temper of the times, he is running against a "do nothing" nice guy who will be the oldest president in United States history, if elected, and there is little doubt that we will have our first female president sometime soon, and she will be a person of color. I find her intelligent, attractive, engaging and energetic, but I don’t like her politics as I am a conservative, and have been all my adult life, At my stage of life, I am not likely to suffer for a socialistic society, but my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who are now approaching a score of Americans surely will.
President Trump seemingly had the right idea during his first thousand days of putting the nation back to work, dropping unemployment lower than I can remember it being, getting Europe to pay for its own defense; reminding the United Nations and the World Health Organization that we could not carry them financially, alone, and confronting China for its stealing our patented intelligence and putting our commerce in a trade deficit that led to a Trade War.
Yes, there is Putin and the common thread of thought that Trump loves despots. This is edgy because I think he loves people who are “in charge,” and despots often are, and he hates governments that expect to be carried, and the list of such nations is legion.
When it comes to Trump as a businessman, what the common every day citizens doesn’t realize and is not interested in knowing is that the best of our corporations are often flying by the seat of their pants with monumental cash flow problems, problems that they not only keep from stockholders and Wall Street, but from the most intimate members of their staff.
Years ago I wrote on Enron for the Executive Excellence magazine and for The Journal for Organizational Excellence. Hardly a more pathetic case of high level jinx and consummate fraud can be matched. But if you read Enron’s history, the corporation sucked itself into believing its lies, what Leon Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.”
If you think that is unusual, CBS “Sixty Minutes” had a segment in which a woman executive had all her degrees on the wall, all of them bogus, and she allowed herself to be interviewed, talking convincingly but absurdly that she did graduate from these universities when in fact she hadn’t attended a single class. The human mind can play tricks on us, and the corporate mind can kill us jobwise and health wise when it believes its own lies.
President Trump, who has done several remarkable things during his traumatic term of office, didn’t need the coronavirus to totally discombobulate him, but it has. The monkey shows we saw daily early on, intended to calm our national anxieties relating to the virus, and to give us the reassurance that progress was being made to contain the virus, with CDC scientists in attendance, but with the Donald as the MC of the show, were in retrospect a little like the McCarthy Congressional Hearings, comedic and equally tragic.
It was as if we had learned nothing with the inept manner with which progress in the Vietnam War had been measured, at least for the American public’s consumption, by presenting body counts daily of the number of the Vietcong dead as reassurance that we were winning this $trillion war.
Likewise, nightly state and national news programs of the diminishing number of coronavirus cases and deaths makes for impressive graphs of statistical summaries of the day, which have the ring of science but like Vietnam, are quite deceiving.
Point of fact, unlike WWII, the American people have not considered this war, their war.
I’m now going back to a point mentioned earlier about cognitive dissonance, but in this sense the focus is on how much we as ordinary citizens rely on symbolic data and symbolic performance.
Presence is a symbolic characteristic as is charisma neither of which has anything to do with competence much less intelligence. Presence and symbolism have had an amazing appeal to ordinary Americans. Consequently, we are guided as much as if not more by symbolism and charisma than we are guided by competence. This is scary.
Presence and charisma have little to do with corporate power when you are the only show in town as Donald Trump once was for many years as a businessman. He lost his shirt in the casinos of Atlantic City, but treated that role, as it turns out, mainly as an absentee landowner, and so he went under. But so did the whole of Atlantic City as Native American Indians came into the casino picture implanting their group culture approach.
When I was working in South Africa and part of a young affluent crowd, one young man, who came from British South African wealth, and who considered himself the quintessential businessman, said to me one day, “Jim, if the world turned itself over to us, there would be a level of economic growth and harmony never known before by man.” I thought he was full of sauce then, but now I’ve watched what a totally business perspective has done to our country, which incidentally, is not the Republican way, but that is another story for another time.
I am writing this because I fear that the Donald will not only lose the election, but perhaps as badly as Senator Walter Mondale lost it to Richard Nixon in 1972 with the largest margin of victory in the Electoral College for a Republican in a US presidential election.
Senator McCarthy turned to booze and self-disgust after being censured by his US Senate colleagues, and died at 48.
We are all of a terribly fragile construction but we don’t like to hear about that. When what other people think of us, no matter how legitimate their justification, it is what we think of ourselves that truly matters. And when it is more important to have friends and colleagues who believe in us rather than for us to be our own best friend and believe in ourselves, we can be easily crushed like an inanimate bug. I pray this doesn’t happen to our president because I think he is not such a bad guy, but just happens to be his own worst enemy.
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