Sen. Joseph McCarthy speaks with reporters at LaGuardia Airport, shortly after his victory over Len Schmitt in the 1952 Wisconsin Republican primary.
Watching PBS’s new documentary, “McCarthy,” about the infamous Wisconsin senator whose shameless fearmongering destroyed the careers of others while catapulting his own, it’s hard not to think about Donald Trump. The U.S. president, now facing his impeachment trial for abuses in office, is never once mentioned in the two-hour American Experience episode set to air Jan. 6. Yet the parallels are inescapable.
McCarthy, like Trump, was above all else a liar. From his February 1950 talk in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he alleged that 205 “card-carrying” Communists were working in the U.S. State Department, to his glib, smiling reaction to being censured by a bipartisan majority of Congress in December 1954, McCarthy was a total conman.
The Democrat-turned-Republican (like Trump!) exaggerated his unremarkable military career by claiming he was wounded in battle when he actually fell off a ladder during a celebration. He made wild and crazy claims, at one point branding Democrats the “commie-track party.” When one of his falsehoods was exposed, he’d simply move on to another. He never conceded error and always hit back. He manipulated the media, delivering “good copy” to hungry reporters. Does any of this sound familiar?
And McCarthy’s GOP colleagues were too cowed by his celebrity to stand up to him. As historian David Oschinsky recounts in the series, “Republicans realize there is just too much political capital at stake for them to desert McCarthy,” even though they knew him to be “a complete loose cannon.”
“McCarthy” neatly blends contemporary interviews with archival footage. It unspools mostly chronologically, showing how the events of the time — the worldwide rise of communism and the espionage charges against Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — set the stage for McCarthy’s opportunistic showboating.
McCarthy’s undoing came during hearings prompted by his increasingly reckless allegations, when Joseph Welch, a lawyer for the U.S. Army, delivered his devastating pre-planned takedown: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” It was a knockout punch from which the one-time boxer McCarthy never recovered, leading to his censure and alcohol-related death three years later.
Here the analogy to Trump, who knew and admired McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn, begins to tatter. Historian Ellen Schrecker notes in the series that McCarthy was “ultimately brought down by moderate Republicans”— a breed that, if it exists at all anymore in Congress, is vastly diminished.
The documentary is perhaps a bit too kind to its subject. One of McCarthy’s targets calls him “quite a charming guy”; another interviewee muses that McCarthy “just wanted people to like him.” And “McCarthy” ends on inarticulate words of praise from McCarthy’s surviving cousin, Dolly Plesser: “He did the very best he could with what the Lord gave him of talents and he used them to the good of the constituents of the people of Wisconsin.” McCarthy’s Appleton tombstone is shown as these words are spoken, just before the credits roll.
Really? Did a guy who caused so much harm deserve such a kind sendoff? Shouldn’t the final word on Joe McCarthy’s legacy be much darker, especially given that we’re now dealing with his modern incarnation?
Early in the film, journalist Jelani Cobb notes, “There is a question as to whether the spirit that animated McCarthy and animated McCarthyism has ever really gone anywhere.” It’s a good question.
