I recently discussed, in a fundraising letter, a man who is widely considered the greatest American of all time. I showed that, far from being a hero, he was a traitor. That man was Martin Luther King Jr.
There is another man, who is widely assumed to have been one of the worst Americans who ever lived, a man whose very name is associated with evil.
What would you say, if I told you that the truth is that there should be a statue honoring this man in our nation’s capitol and thousands of towns and cities, with courthouses, parks, schools and streets named after him, as well, all over the country?
Some of you will have already guessed that the man in question was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, ol’ Tailgunner Joe.
Not too long ago, I read the late M. Stanton Evans' book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his Fight Against America’s Enemies.
Not only does Evans tell the truth about Tailgunner Joe, but his book is one of the most amazing pieces of research you'll ever read, and of historiography—the story of how history is written. (Evans surely had a team of researchers; no one man could have conducted such Herculean research on his own.) And it's an ugly tale.
Many of you will be familiar with the famous line leveled at McCarthy by lawyer Joseph Welch, during the 1954 Army-McCarthy Hearings (May 25):
“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”My now 89-year-old mom recited that line many times to me during my childhood, although she always referred to Welch as “Judge Welch.” I could find no record of Welch ever having been a judge. Possibly, Mom was confusing Welch’s role in the real-life hearings, where he was special counsel to the U.S. Army, with his role as a judge in the Otto Preminger courtroom masterpiece, Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
Welch was an excellent actor.
There are two contexts to Welch’s condemnation of McCarthy, one fake and the other real.
The fake context was that McCarthy had somehow ruined the life of a young associate of Welch from the latter’s Boston law firm, Frederick G. Fisher Jr., by outing him as a communist sympathizer.
The true context was that it was not Senator McCarthy, but Welch himself who had outed Fisher, and had done so in a New York Times article published on April 16, 1954, 39 days before Welch blamed McCarthy for Welch’s actions.
The matter is so significant that Stan Evans saw fit to have much of the article photocopied and reproduced on a page of his tome.
Evans: “OUTEDIn today’s America, the official story is often 180 degrees opposite to the truth. Please help me continue to preserve the truth.
“Army Counsel Joseph Welch denounced McCarthy for outing Welch’s assistant Frederick Fisher as a former member of a cited [communist] front group called the National Lawyers Guild. But Welch himself had publicly confirmed Fisher’s former Guild membership weeks earlier in this New York Times story of April 16, 1954.
New York Times: “The Army charges were signed by its new special counsel, Joseph N. Welch. Mr. Welch today confirmed news reports that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederic G. Fisher Jr. of his own Boston law office, because of admitted previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell Jr., the Attorney General, as a Communist-front organization.”
“Mr. Welch said he had brought in another lawyer, John Kimball Jr. from his Boston office to take Mr. Fisher’s place.”
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I thank you, and your posterity will, too.
Sincerely,
Nicholas Stix
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