Clay Risen
speaker
88 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Clay Risen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, I think for two reasons. First of all, he was useful to them. He was willing to go after Democrats in a way that they didn't quite feel comfortable doing. There was still a real order of decorum in the Senate that he violated very clearly. And so you have someone like Robert Taft, who was the Senate Majority Leader, the Mr. Republican in the Senate. He...
would never do something like what McCarthy did. But he very openly defended McCarthy and coached McCarthy on how to perform. And, you know, he was just that guy who was willing to say things that no one else did and land punches. But at the same time, they were also a little afraid of him because if you turned against him, he would make an example out of you.
The best example of that is Margaret Chase Smith, who was a senator from Maine. And relatively early on, this is in the summer of 1950, she gave a speech on the floor of the Senate and said, look, what he's doing is un-American. This is un-American.
unacceptable a senator should no one should be doing this and she got a few people to sign on ultimately they all dropped out and as soon as he could McCarthy I mean McCarthy went after her immediately but as soon as he got a committee position after 1952 She happened to be on his committee and he demoted her and sort of exiled her from any position of power.
And, you know, that became a, let's say, a cautionary tale for a lot of other senators. And it took a long time before anyone was willing to stand up and say, this man is unacceptable.
Yeah. And it's noteworthy that McCarthy's first speech, the sort of debut of this at a Republican meeting in West Virginia, came in January of 1950. And it was just weeks after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. We know now that, you know, Alger Hiss was a spy for the Soviet Union within the U.S. government. We know that
Julius Rosenberg and his circle did steal atomic secrets and give them to the Soviet Union. We do know that the Communist Party of the United States facilitated a lot of this. But what we also know is that there weren't many. Aside from Rosenberg, they didn't have much impact. And most importantly, by the end of World War II, The Soviets had largely dismantled their espionage efforts.
They didn't think they were worth it. They weren't happy with the results. They later restarted them, of course. But what's important is during the Red Scare, there wasn't really espionage going on. And yet that's what everyone was afraid of. And so after that, for McCarthy to come along and say, well, I have evidence of spies and
It was hard, at least initially, for anyone to say he's completely wrong because, hey, there's evidence that there were spies. But you're right that his ultimately, as crazy as he was in terms of just, not clinically crazy, but his just shoot from the hip willingness to say anything, his manipulation, his understanding of how the media worked and his manipulation of the media was insane.
was genius. And, you know, just for example, one thing he would do would be to wait until right before deadlines, right before you had to file a story. And this is back when there was only print, so there was no option other than you've got to get this story in. And he would identify the thirstiest, most driven reporters who, you know, all they wanted was that, to get in that deadline.
Give me the scoop. Yeah, get that scoop. And he would tell them, you know, just the most outlandish thing, that they didn't have time to fact check, that they couldn't start to call around and verify. And they were faced with choice. Do I print this scoop and hope that it's true? Or do I lose this scoop, someone else gets it, and I look bad? More often than not, they went with the scoop.
And more often than not, in fact, pretty much always, it was completely fabricated.
You know, Eisenhower is an interesting character in this story because he definitely, I think, drew a line and said – Anything beyond this is unacceptable in terms of anti-communist activity. And certainly, McCarthy was in that beyond the pale category. But there were a lot of things that he did allow. And he had his own version of a much more aggressive loyalty test than Truman did. He also...
oversaw and reinforced what today is called the Lavender Scare, in which anti-communism or fear, you know, allegations of subversion were used to fire hundreds of gay men from the federal government, mostly in the State Department. And so Eisenhower tolerated a lot of stuff that today we would look at and say that's disgusting that he would be for that. But
He should get some credit for saying, and I believe that there was a point at which this wasn't going to go further. And I think, at least I make the argument, that for him, he was trying to essentially just dry out. the Red Scare, and run it out. And that he believed, like Truman believed, that fundamentally the American people were not radicals.
The American people are pragmatic, centrist, and that they would come to their senses with good, strong hand at the tiller, very straight and narrow leadership, that he would provide. That was his idea. And he also, behind the scenes, went after McCarthy. It took him a while, probably too long, but he ultimately did go after McCarthy and really cut his legs out from under him.
And so Eisenhower was a big part of that story. He's not the only part, but I think it's important that he came along. And it mattered that you had a Republican doing this, given that Truman and Roosevelt unfairly had been tagged as soft on communism.
Yeah, well, I think, first of all, it's just basic parallels. We see a lot of the same animus toward ideas we don't like, or that some people don't like. We see the same willingness to use oppressive ideas measures to silence those views or to silence those organizations or people that we disagree with. And so it's a reminder that what happened during the Red Scare can be repeated.
So I think there's that. But I think there's also something more causal in the sense that, you know, After McCarthy fell and after Warren pared back the tools of the Red Scare, there was still a lot of... There was a hard kernel of people who believed, who continued to believe in the cause.
And these were people who funneled into groups like the John Birch Society and other sort of similar, very far-right organizations who believed that McCarthy was a martyr and that there was this cabal of... anti-American elites running the government. And that didn't stop just because the Red Scare did. And it pops up here and there throughout subsequent American history.
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