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Echoes of Joe McCarthy in Donald Trump's Rise
Echoes of Joe McCarthy in Donald Trump's Rise
By Lou Cannon - July 31, 2015
He was a Democrat turned Republican who made alarming accusations and liked the sound of his own voice. He used statistics that could not be verified or were demonstrably wrong. He frightened the establishment, which was slow to combat him, for he had unlimited resources and bullied his critics. He perplexed the press, making so many charges that reporters could not keep up with them. He was at first dismissed as a clown but he built a grassroots following among people fed up with conventional politics.
He wasn’t Donald Trump but Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who for nearly five years in the early 1950s struck fear into official Washington with accusations that communists had infiltrated the national government.
McCarthy smeared two of President Harry Truman’s cabinet officers — Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense George Marshall, a distinguished World War II general — and accused scores of civil servants, several of whom retired, of being “inclined to communism.” Less remembered is that he ruined the careers of others by implying that they were homosexuals. “McCarthyism,” a word coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block, was defined as "the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism."
McCarthy’s rise was abetted, as Trump’s has been, by press coverage that took outrageous claims at face value. In those days of television’s infancy, Americans depended for their news on newspapers; 85 percent of the national news came from wire services. They were ill-equipped to deal with McCarthy, whose first headline-grabbing foray occurred on a brisk February day in 1950 in Wheeling, W.Va., when he told a Republican women’s club: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”
more at link...
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/07/31/echoes_of_joe_mccarthy_in_donald_trumps_rise_127597.html
By Lou Cannon - July 31, 2015
He was a Democrat turned Republican who made alarming accusations and liked the sound of his own voice. He used statistics that could not be verified or were demonstrably wrong. He frightened the establishment, which was slow to combat him, for he had unlimited resources and bullied his critics. He perplexed the press, making so many charges that reporters could not keep up with them. He was at first dismissed as a clown but he built a grassroots following among people fed up with conventional politics.
He wasn’t Donald Trump but Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who for nearly five years in the early 1950s struck fear into official Washington with accusations that communists had infiltrated the national government.
McCarthy smeared two of President Harry Truman’s cabinet officers — Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense George Marshall, a distinguished World War II general — and accused scores of civil servants, several of whom retired, of being “inclined to communism.” Less remembered is that he ruined the careers of others by implying that they were homosexuals. “McCarthyism,” a word coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block, was defined as "the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism."
McCarthy’s rise was abetted, as Trump’s has been, by press coverage that took outrageous claims at face value. In those days of television’s infancy, Americans depended for their news on newspapers; 85 percent of the national news came from wire services. They were ill-equipped to deal with McCarthy, whose first headline-grabbing foray occurred on a brisk February day in 1950 in Wheeling, W.Va., when he told a Republican women’s club: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”
more at link...
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/07/31/echoes_of_joe_mccarthy_in_donald_trumps_rise_127597.html
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