George Orwell once said that the word "communist" had become so debased that it had lost its original meaning. In Orwell's England, toffs dining at posh restaurants called inattentive waiters "communists," and on the way home said the same thing about cab drivers who got lost.
The term "McCarthyism" has suffered a similar fate -- as I was reminded when I read a press release in which Anchorage lawyer Kevin Clarkson, stepping in to defend Gov. Sarah Palin, invoked the specter of Joseph McCarthy to condemn Sen. Hollis French and others investigating so-called Troopergate.
"McCarthy-style Inquisition" is the phrase with which Clarkson attacked French and while announcing that he, and the Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute, had come to save Alaskans from French's partisan politics.
Hollis French may be open to criticism for what he has said and done as chairman of the Judiciary Committee but mentioning him in the same breath with Joe McCarthy (1908-1957) is ridiculous.
Richard Rovere, Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, opened his masterful biography of McCarthy with a brief paragraph that captures McCarthy's essence.
"The late Joseph R. McCarthy, a United States Senator from Wisconsin, was in many ways the most gifted demagogue ever bred on these shores. No bolder seditionist ever moved among -- not any politician with a surer, swifter access to the dark place of the American mind."
McCarthy, a Republican, entered the Senate in 1946 after winning election on a campaign of lies -- lies about his achievements in the military, lies about opponents' record. The lies were new but not the method. In McCarthy's first successful campaign, seeking a judgeship in northern Wisconsin, he contrasted his youth with the advanced age of the incumbent. As Rovere explains, "In speeches and campaign literature, (McCarthy) said the man was seventy-three. Now and then he advanced him to eighty-nine."
During the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy made his name synonymous with the search for domestic subversives -- communists. He had lists of communists, lists and lists, finding Marxists throughout American government, especially the State Department. He routinely appeared as Chairman of the Committee on Government Operations with a giant briefcase stuffed with names.
There were communists in the federal government: That much was true. But McCarthy rarely knew who they were. His lists were as fictional as his campaign resume. But that didn't stop him from bullying witnesses and ruining reputations.
The Senate came to its senses in late 1954 and censured McCarthy 77-22. He soon fell ill and died.
McCarthy was unusual in appearance, manner and voice. He was also unusual in his lack of respect for middle-class pieties and conventions. This is one of his most striking features, captured vividly by Richard Rovere.
"While his contemporaries were slavishly adapting themselves to the ways urged on them by (advertising men, opinion samplers, the moguls of television), McCarthy paid no attention to any of it. He didn't want the world to think of him as respectable. He encouraged photographers to take pictures of him sleeping, disheveled, on an office couch, like a bum on a park bench, coming out of a shower with a towel wrapped around his torso, like (boxer) Rocky Marciano or sprawled on the floor in his shirt sleeves with a hooker of bourbon close at hand."
What did McCarthy want? Apparently, attention. He wanted to be a national figure and briefly he was, although as Rovere says "Beyond mischief, he never accomplished anything."
It's instructive to understand that the word "McCarthyism" was invented by a cartoonist -- Herb Block of the Washington Post. Instructive because we can see in retrospect what a dangerous cartoon of democracy both the man and the ism were.
Kevin Clarkson is a bright lawyer. But his reading list needs improvement. I am going to send him a copy of Richard Rovere's biography of Joseph McCarthy. If he reads it, he will understand why McCarthy's name should never be casually invoked to score a political point.
Michael Carey is a former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.
MICHAEL CAREY
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