October 12, 2020 • 39 mins
At one point Joe McCarthy was amongst the most powerful and dangerous of people, what specifically within his character, personality and earlier life experiences enabled him to rise from poor farm boy to senator to demagogue?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Joseph McCarthy
was a Republican U S Senator from the state of
Wisconsin from seven until his death in nineteen fifty seven.
He was the public face of the nineteen fifties fears
(00:22):
and resulting political activism during the United States versus Soviet
Union Cold War tensions regarding communists subversion in the United States.
He alleged that numerous Communists, Soviet spies, and sympathizers had
infiltrated the United States federal government, as well as academic universities,
(00:43):
Hollywood and other places, a practice that came to be
coined McCarthyism. Part of his practice was to use smear
tactics to attack the character or patriotism of his subject
and ultimately the Senate censure him for this. I'm doctor
Gale Saul, and this is Personalogy. My guest today is
(01:07):
journalist and author Larry Tye, who was a New York
Times bestselling author and author of the newly released Demagogue,
The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, as
well as the book Bobby Kennedy The Making of a
Liberal Icon. TAI runs the Boston based Health Coverage Fellowship,
which helps the media do a better job reporting on
(01:29):
critical issues like public health, mental health, and high tech medicine.
He was an award winning writer for The Boston Globe.
Joe McCarthy was born in Night on a farm in
Grand Shoote in Wisconsin, and that he was the fifth
(01:50):
of seven children. In terms of his home life in Wisconsin,
there was nothing extraordinary or remarkable, let's say about his
circum dances. It was a pretty typical farm life in
Wisconsin with parents who were Irish descendants Irish Americans. Um.
But maybe you could talk a little bit about that,
(02:12):
that family life and that early time and how it was.
It was formative for him from a very early age.
Joe McCarthy was both very competitive and very entrepreneurial. He
was competitive in that he was as soon as he
got his first pair of boxing gloves looking for anybody
to duke it out with in the family or in
(02:34):
the neighborhood. And he was entrepreneurial in that, at a
very young age, having graduated from grammar school, he went
out and became a chicken tycoon. And what that meant
was he had thousands of laying hens and he built
this little empire, and it worked brilliantly until he got sick,
(02:59):
and trust did his empire to some people to look
it over for a while, and a virus spread among
the birds and they died. And he went from being
a tycoon to being penniless, which is the natural state
of affairs in um small farms like his with big
families in Wisconsin, and that meant he had to reinvent himself,
(03:22):
and he reinvented himself by being a maven at a
store called Cashway, one of a series of stores that
were like a seven eleven, and again he stood out.
His store quickly became the best selling in that little
Cashway empire. Joe McCarthy showed that he didn't have to
(03:42):
have an education, that he could make a go of it,
and then at a point when he was about twenty
years old, he finally decided that he wanted to do more,
that maybe getting an education wasn't a bad idea. And
so I think a lot of people who look at
the caricatured view of Joe McCarthy think this wasn't a
very smart guy. He was a big, brawny, sort of
(04:03):
bully like guy, and in fact he was smart enough
that when he finally decided to go to high school,
he made it through four years in a single year,
which was extraordinary in which led him to college and
to the first lie of his life. To go back
for a second, a couple of really interesting things about
so what what could we see in this kid that
(04:25):
might have helped us understand how he would come to
be the kind of adult that he did. And a
couple of interesting points. One is the temperament that you
point out that he was as a kid, by all evidence,
extremely competitive and had certain kinds of ambition. The ambition
might have changed focus, you know, whether it was I
(04:47):
got to get done with high school in one year
or I'm going to make money as this chicken tycoon. Um,
But they were they were extraordinary feats in their own way,
and he was very driven in a pursuit of them,
and that the competitiveness sometimes manifested itself in as you
(05:08):
brought up this very aggressive form. So he was very
into boxing, and he thought nothing of you know, really
laying it all out there with child opponents essentially, But
he would also teach. He would also teach other people
to box, So he was complicated people when they think
(05:29):
of Joe McCarthy, right, they like to be very black
and white. They like to say, you know, he was
all a bad guy, or no, he wasn't a bad guy,
or he was all paranoid, or no he wasn't. But
you see even early on that he was a very
he was multidimensional. He could he could say I'm going
to teach you how to box, or he could pummel
you and knock you out, um and be highly highly aggressive.
(05:54):
And I think it's just important that we sort of
as we think about him, that keep that duality, you know,
these the different sides of him in mind. I think
it's important that we consider the family aspirations. The father
Tim came, bought all this land, uh, made a farm
of it. He'd already risen himself up from where he was.
(06:17):
They wanted their kids to be something and do something.
A completely different kind of family where aspirations were, would
you be able to sort of make money and take
care of yourself, let's say, um, and so he really
was the only child who showed the academic aptitude and
the kind of drive to go on and complete education
(06:39):
in a rapid way and and aspire even to college. Um,
that was not something typical for the family. Everything you
said is true, and I want to take three threads
that I think to find Joe's early life. Um. First
of all, you said in ending that the UM this
was not something that his parents saw as an aspiration
(07:00):
and for their kids, And that's absolutely true. And in fact,
Joe said in later life that it would have scared
the heck out of his mother if she had ever
seen him rise to the Senate. I mean, he was going,
not to mention becoming the national and international figure that
he became. But the three threads in his early life
that stayed with him throughout were Number One, ambition, sort
(07:23):
of highly competitive and ambitious, and that would have meant
something UM in and of itself, but it was combined
with real talent. So he had ambition and he had
the ability to see the ambition through and those might
have made him into a great figure of uh stature
(07:44):
in the country that we'd be looking at in a
revered way today if it wasn't for the third element
that was a part of his personality from very early on,
and that was opportunism, and that was the willingness to
do whatever it took to see that ambition through. It's
a sort of scary triumvit if you add natural talent,
(08:05):
the ambition that drives you to do something that's going
to put you in the limelight, and the willingness to
do anything, including embellish or outright lie, to get you
where you wanted to go. Those three were an amazing
combination for a politician to have and what made him
(08:28):
successful but also took him beyond to the point where
you and I seventy years later talking about him, because
he made a name for himself and he became an ism,
which is an unusual thing to become. It's such a
good point about opportunism, which touches on the question of
what is your moral compass. Moral compasses are formed initially
(08:50):
in childhood and continue to develop, you know, I'd say,
an early adulthood, and then they're they're pretty formed by then.
So your family of origin has a big impact on
your moral compass. And in fact, he had what at
the time would be called, you know, god fearing of
Christian Irish Catholic parents. They were not a super religious family,
(09:15):
but they were a religious family and Catholicism was important.
But as his parents saw him not necessarily, let's say,
following the rules all the time in terms of his
early business, and sometimes breaking the rules for his betterment. Today,
(09:35):
no one would be allowed to complete high school in
one year. That would just not be allowed, even if
you academically could do it. Skirting the rules for his
betterment was something that seemed to be acceptable and approved
of by the family and not really questioned. Judging from
things that his siblings said about him over the years
and judging from things that his father did to enable
(09:57):
what he did over the years, I think his family
were partly in awe of him. He was by far
the most charismatic. He from an early age made clear
that he was the one who was going to put
the McCarthy name somewhere. I don't think they ever saw
it being quite where it ended up. But I also
think that there was um in a way that any
(10:18):
family of that size and of that sort of um
Middle America solidity. There was a sense that they were
going to support him no matter what he did, and
they were going to over the years justify what he did,
no matter what he did. And I think they were
a bit in awe of and I don't think they
quite knew what to do with him, just like most
(10:40):
people who came in contact with him over the years.
One of the things that was another thread that ran
through his entire life, starting with his college career and
even in high school and going all the way through
the end of his life, was um that people perpetually
underestimated him. He looked more like a puge list and
(11:00):
like a politician, and he looked like somebody who didn't
have the looks or the charisma to rise to become
the second most popular person in America. And so that
was part of what he used to get ahead, I think,
was having people perpetually underestimate just how smart he was
(11:22):
and just how ruthless he was. Let's take a quick
break here. We'll be back in a moment. Didn't bed
bed bed beddy, bed and Beddy. He did go to college.
Actually college was sort of a blend with he started
(11:45):
off in the engineering that performed very poorly. I think
it's worth noting that even though his high school principle said,
you know, this kid is unbelievable, and you know, wrote
letters that you know that this kid has done something
that's never been on and intellectually, it's incredible. Then when
he got to college, he was a pretty mediocre to
(12:05):
not very good student, and certainly engineering was not for him.
He made this pivot to law, which he thought would
be easier and he would be able to do better
in and perhaps it interested him more. And he was
a very average student. He was an average student, but
I think that was partly because he didn't have the
(12:26):
capacity or the interest in working hard. He would do
something amazing. So, as any of your listeners know who
know anything about law school education, they are generally big
classes and you generally have you break down into small
study groups, and it's that group that you bond with,
that group that you learned through. And Joe was brilliant
at doing no work during the semester, at showing up
(12:48):
its study group and being able to absorb everything his
classmates were saying. And I think that suggested the same
capacity he had in high school. He was a sponge.
He could absorb in a extraordinary amount of material, and
especially in a program like law, where it was absorbing
and sort of giving back. And it was a good
(13:09):
law school, but not a great law school. So he
did fine, and he did find at most courses um
he did fairly mediocre, and most of the courses on
ethics and morality in college, but he did well enough
to get by. He was somebody who was law school
classmates years later remembered not for his intellectual rigor and
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but it was for his ability to soak it all
in in the end and do what it took to
get by. And I think that that is in a way, again,
knowing what we know about his later career, when we
go back and look at the earlier career, we can
say that that was classic Joe McCarthy, bending the rules,
doing four years in one year, by absorbing what went
(13:56):
on and study group and not what went on in
the classroom, by taking through jobs when he was in college,
and being willing to do anything to earn the extra
buck to give him a little financial freedom, and be
able to take out the women that he was taking
out and show them um a good time. But he
also did something which was kind of extraordinary. If you
(14:18):
read anything that he said or wrote during the years
about what had happened when he was in college, you
would think that his parents cut him loose and said
you make your own way. Where we find out later
when we look at some of his personal records that
in fact his father was helping him in school and
never getting credit for it, because that didn't fit with
the image of self made Joe McCarthy who goes out
(14:41):
and puts himself through school with three jobs. And he
was even at a very young age, looking to a
resume that he knew would someday be important to him
when he was going to go on and do great things,
and he was building that resume through some combination of
accomplishment an embellishment. You can even argue, because of course
(15:02):
this was before he really even tried to turn to
political life, or was or there was evidence that he
was planning on political life, that just as important to
him was maintaining enough denial and compartmentalization that he could
hold on to his own personal ideal that he was
(15:23):
a self made man. That seemed to be important in
the image that he was projecting even for himself. That
his father didn't help him who he did, that he
didn't get loans from friends, which he did, that you know,
people weren't providing him the information that he could sponge up,
which is exactly what happened. And along with that you
(15:44):
see evidence of the beginnings of this. I'll call it hedonism.
He really liked to take out women. Uh number of
women reported it was fun, but not so enjoyable because
at the end of the day he was like an octopus.
He didn't treat me so nicely. In college, especially, he
wanted to be the big guy on campus. He was
(16:04):
willing to do, even at that early stage in college,
whatever it took. And what that meant was when he
ran for the head of his um law school class,
when he wanted to be president of his law school class,
he made a deal with this guy named Charles Kerran,
who was the guy who was running against him, and
the deal was in a way that a mensch would do.
(16:26):
Will each vote for one another. We're not going to
vote for ourselves, and then we'll see what the rest
of the class does. So they did that. There was
a tie vote, and then in the second round McCarthy
won by two votes, and when they went back and
sort of tried to understand what had happened, he won
because he voted for himself. And when he was confronted
(16:48):
by Charles Kurrn and said, how could you do that?
McCarthy said, in all my campaigning, I realized I really
was the guy, the better man, as I was telling
people that I was, and you wouldn't want me to
vote for somebody other than the better man. Now, what
that really was was the classic sort of spin on
the fact did he just wanted to win and he
would do what it took to win. And I'm surprised.
(17:09):
The only surprise in the story to me is not
what he did in the second round, but that he
actually voted for Current in the first round. He played
by the rules once and that was an unusual thing.
I think. The other sort of surprising thing, but again
a testament to the kind of man that he was,
is that after that he managed to maintain the friendship too.
(17:30):
He managed to then bend over backwards and be giving
in some other way too. I think he he said, here,
take my car. I'm going to help drive you your
father sick. There was a story where he basically helped
out the other guy to say, like, look, I I
did do this, but like I really I I met
well and I still want to be your friend. His
charisma and his ability to do that even after and
(17:54):
this is really I think is important because when we
later go on to look at what he does to
people he is able to maintain this splitting is it
would be the psychological term that he is divided into.
He only sees the side he wants to see. I'm
not that bad guy who basically cheated, right, I voted
(18:14):
for myself after we made a deal that we wouldn't
do that. I'm this good guy who will help you
in a dire situation, and I'm really your friend. And
he managed to perpetuate those things not only in his
head but externally and bring them to fruition. He did.
And so the psychological term is splitting. The journalistic term
(18:35):
that I'm comfortable with is contradictions. And he was most
interesting people in the world have contradictions. Very few have
as big as split or set of contradictions as Joe McCarthy.
And so what he did perpetually throughout his early life
and his career was he would savage somebody on the
(18:57):
witness stand and then invite him out for a drink afterwards.
He thought that it was all part of a game,
and don't you get the game? And I'm still a
good guy. And I think that that helps explain why
the state of Wisconsin ended up sending him to the
Senate twice, and why he rose to be as popular
as he was. He had this measure of charisma. Um,
(19:20):
he was the guy. He was a guy that I
would love to have gone out for a drink with.
I wouldn't have wanted to get up in front of
him and a witness stand. I wouldn't have wanted to
have to cover him. But he was a guy who
really was a regular guy except when he was bulldozing
through you to get what he wanted. And that set
(19:43):
of contradictions was extraordinary. People in later life would say
he spent half of his life as a bulldog and
the other half as a lapdog, and managing to do
both for as long and as successfully as he did
on the one hand, as brilliant and in the their hand,
I think spelled his ultimate undoing. You can't have that
(20:03):
kind of split a contradiction and last forever. So we've
seen this, you know, historically, again and again in certain figures.
They're usually leaders who preach something in a in an
incredibly strong and dogged manner. We could be talking about um,
you know, Mark Foley, head of of of of Child
(20:27):
and Protective services, you know, within the government, but you
know who turned out to be having relations with young interns.
We could be talking about Haggardy and being a reverend preaching,
you know, intensely strongly the importance of you know, anti homosexual,
anti drugs, anti all these things, and doing all of
(20:48):
those things, so that the urge, psychologically speaking, the urge
to do and Joe McCarthy's case, to be very aggressive,
so aggressive that you will mow over and destroy any
one for your betterment. But the part of your mind
that says, well, that's that's not okay. I mean, at
some level, I know that's not okay. And I'm not
(21:09):
that bad guy. I'm not the bad guy who wants
to do that thing. I'm really this other good guy
who will take you out for a drink and be
your buddy, and so that makes it okay. And when
those two things are so divided and not integrated in
a person's mind, their ability to behave and really go
to the max on their unacceptable behaviors is sort of
(21:32):
is sort of set free. I guess I'll say it's
unexamined and and and certainly that seems to be to
have been the case, and I think this just sets
the table. We can see how this sets the table
for him to go on and do some of the
Now we'll go, well, let's let's turn to some of
those things, will turn to his rise. Can I just
(21:52):
make one comment on what you said. You're the mental
health expert, and I don't pretend to be able to
psychoanalyze him as effectively as you do. But in most politicians,
when there is that kind of split, the public persona
is the good guy and then we find out that
there was something dark about them. What's unusual about McCarthy
(22:12):
as it was flipped, the public persona was the dark guy,
and the surprises that he had a good guy in him.
And that was part of what I was intrigued about
finding out about. When I was writing this book, I
had heard from a woman who to me is um
part of a couple that were the most iconic liberals
(22:33):
of my generation, a woman named Ethel Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy's widow,
that Joe McCarthy. She said to me when I was
interviewing her for my biography of Bobby Kennedy. She said,
Joe McCarthy might have been a monster. Too much of America.
But to us, he was just good, plain fun, And
I thought, geez, that's the side of him that I
(22:53):
didn't know existed. I'm not hearing it from some um
fellow traveling uh conservative, I'm hearing it from this iconic
liberal um matriarch. And I want to see what that
side was. I want to see if I can understand
it and show that John McCarthy wasn't all of what
we thought he was. Well, the ability for many people
(23:15):
who split to frame their dark side as good is
not unusual. And so if you convince yourself that, uh,
the being with an intern is caring for them too. Um,
if you you know, if you if you can convince
(23:37):
yourself that what you're doing is really and in the
case of Joe mccarnthy, righteous and protective and uh, you know,
even if somewhere else you know it's for your own good.
You know, these things can become very compartmentalized. So, um,
it may become acceptable, it may become accept more than acceptable,
(23:58):
maybe evidence to yourself that you are are being as
good as they get, you know, so to speak. Let's
take a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment.
Bedding bed beddy bed and bedding. He graduated law school,
(24:22):
he opens the practice, um, he joins a law firm.
This is in the mid nineteen thirties. He develops a
bit of a reputation right for being quick and efficient.
He developed that reputation as a lawyer um being willing
to also do anything, keep his office open, his light
(24:43):
burning much of the night. And he also develops a reputation,
or I should say, refines a reputation, because we already
talked about that reputation of being willing to do anything,
and that included taking on his senior law partner, the
guy who gave him his big break. Joe wanted to
run for office, and so the disc guy. So I
(25:05):
should say first, the first office Joe ever ran for
was as district attorney, and he may have been one
of the least qualified people to ever run for that office,
a young lawyer, no real experience, but nothing was going
to hold him back, and he runs for district attorney
in an unusual way. Joe McCarthy we think of in
what we're given in the history books as one of
(25:26):
the icons of the American right. But back then he
runs for office as a Democrat, as an avid flaming
New dealer as a big supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. And
there was only one problem, and the part of Wisconsin
where he was doing that, Democrats didn't get elected, and
certainly flaming New Dealers didn't get elected. And McCarthy very
(25:48):
quickly understood again this motto that I will keep coming
back to whatever it takes. And what it took was
sometime maybe in the middle of the night, when nobody
was looking, you go and you change your party registration
from Democrat to Republican, and then you pick an office
as your first office when you've made that change, a
(26:08):
nonpartisan office that is a circuit court judge. And the
fact that your um sponsor and legal partner wants to
have that same office and deserves it, who cares? You
let him know at the last minute, just as you're announcing,
and then you barrel over him. And this guy named
(26:28):
Mike Eberline his law partner. Depending on the story. Over
the years, when McCarthy started getting more powerful, Eberline started
getting less candid about admitting how outraged he was that
Joe McCarthy had dissed him. But you don't have to
listen to what he said. You watch what he did.
And suddenly Joe McCarthy wasn't his buddy and his law partner.
(26:51):
And McCarthy wins that office. He wins it partly by
making an issue of the age of the income bent,
and he wins it by embellishing the age of the
incumbent was old enough that it could have become an issue,
but he picks an older age. The income over time
that the incumbent made sounds like a whole lot of
(27:12):
money if you add up ten years and you put
it together, and you say, was he worth not five
thousand dollars a year? But was he worth fifty dollars?
And he made it seem like this pillar of the
legal community and of the general community was somehow out
scamming the public. And it worked, and he not only
(27:34):
one office, but he converted that incumbent into what the
incumbents son called Joe McCarthy's first victim. Overnight, the incumbent
went from being this long serving judge to being this
scammer of the public. And it wasn't true. And it
was a sign of McCarthy's willingness to win office, to
(27:57):
do or say just about anything to return for a
second to McCarthy's moral compass, the use of alternative facts,
the birth of alternative facts, and frankly, these were outright lies,
not facts, and he it's not something that had typically
(28:18):
been done, but he took to that. And in addition
to doing what he did to his law partner, Um,
let's just discuss the idea of no allegiance to one's ideology.
Did Joe McCarthy have an ideology? So I want to
be consistent as a biographer. And when I wrote a
(28:39):
biography on Bobby Kennedy, I talked about it being growth
that he went from being a Joe McCarthy cold warrior
at the beginning of his career to becoming an iconic
liberal figure. And I would love to be able to
say what Joe McCarthy was doing was growing in his
move from being a liberal to being a conservative. I
think what he was doing was showing that on that
(29:00):
moral compass that you were talking about. I don't know
if there is a dial point in that compass of
a morality, but if there was, he was a moral
I think his moral compass was to get ahead, to
see his ambition rewarded, to get a limelight, and he
would have probably if he were here. As part of
(29:21):
this conversation we're having now said that he wanted that
so that he could do important things and that it
didn't matter whether he came from the right or the left.
If you got enough power, he could change things. Uh,
that doesn't wash. And the truth is that his change
was because that was what it took to get elected.
And you could have argued with Bobby Kennedy then, in fact,
(29:45):
his electability would have been stronger had he stayed closer
to the middle of the road instead of going out
there on the political left where he felt more comfortable.
In later life, John McCarthy went wherever the ground was
most solid in his electoral drive. And I want to
just say one other things. So we were talking about
the word embellishment. The reason I didn't call that a
(30:07):
lie is because I want to save lies for the
really big ones he told. But it was a lie.
And what McCarthy learned brilliantly, and I think it remains
true to this day, is you don't get punished anymore
for telling a big lie than you do a little lie.
And so over time he learned to tell whoppers. But
in the early days. It was more a stretching than
(30:31):
an ignoring of the facts. He goes on to become
a judge, and in that setting he he gets this
reputation for clearing the backlog quickly. He gets a reputation
for granting divorces quickly, which is pretty fascinating for somebody
from his religious background. I'll just say that that seems
(30:53):
like a real departure there. And then he also goes
on to enlist in the war, even though as a
judge he he was technically exempt. Uh. It seems as
though he thinks this will be good for him reputationally too.
He sees that being an enlisted man actually has been
(31:16):
helpful to other people who are trying to launch political careers,
and he he does do that. And again we see
during his time um in the South Pacific, we we
see this duality of on the one hand, he's claiming
he goes on to claim he's things that he wasn't
and he did things that he didn't because it because
(31:39):
he's creating this narrative of you know, being you know,
being a private being at the lowest rung, working his
way up being in the most dangerous tail gunner position
and so on. That's all important, even if it's untrue.
But he also there seems to be a lot of guys,
as you're pointing out, who say, well, now he was
really you know, he served well. He he was part
(32:02):
of our group as we watched each other's back and
like I, I want to be I want to be
serving with Joe McCarthy. Yeah. So one of the things, UM,
that I was lucky in getting when I was writing
the book was UM. For seventy years, since McCarthy died, UM,
people have been trying to get access to his personal
and professional papers. His widow left them to his alma mater,
(32:25):
Marquette University, and they've been saying forever because that's what
the family has been saying, that nobody could see them,
and not because I'm charming, but because I was lucky
or a pin on the neck and they wanted to
get rid of me. I got to see those papers,
and one of the things in those papers was his
handwritten wartime diaries and Joe McCarthy when he first ran
(32:48):
for higher office, he ran calling himself tailgunner Joe, saying
that I was a war hero and I'm coming back
now and I'm going to do for the country what
I did for my country in the South Pacific. And
over the years journalists doubted that that was true, and
they said the medals he got were for political reasons.
Um the television networks actually did an entire hour long
(33:11):
documentary called Tailgunner Joe, making fun of him. That became
a caricature. What we see, shockingly in those wartime diaries
was that he documented every time he went up and
flew as a tailgunner. His official assignment was as a
land based intelligence officer, but he raised his hand and
(33:33):
he said I'll go, and he volunteered for missions that
could have gotten him killed. He volunteered for missions where
he actually was a tailgunner, and his squad mates in
later years wrote letters saying he did what he said
he did. Now that raises two interesting questions. One is,
if you tell enough lies, nobody is going to believe
you when you tell the truth. But in a way,
(33:55):
the more interesting psychological question to me is, if he
had these letters, and if he had the diaries that
showed that he was telling the truth, why didn't he
hold them up and say here is what I'm saying.
They're making fun of me, but I can prove that
it was true, and I think, wanting to give him
the benefit of the doubt, that he actually decided that
(34:17):
much as he was about as shameless a character as
there was, that he decided some things were beyond the pale,
and he took seriously enough what he had done in
the Marines that if it required him to stoop to
the level of having to show his handwritten diaries or
point to his buddies saying he wasn't a liar, that
(34:39):
would have been almost as embarrassing as being called a liar.
And he wasn't going to do that, and he's not
here to for me to ask, and he never said
in his personal papers. Here's why I'm not pointing out
that some of these actually showed that I was telling
the truth. But we go back after the fact and
try to figure out what he was thinking, and I
want to give him the benefit of that doubt. And
(35:00):
I think that partly in writing a biography, anybody tries
to take a historic and caricatured character and make them
a little more true to life and flesh and blood.
And as we see that there are many things in
McCarthy's record that make him even more despicable than we thought.
We have to acknowledge the things that make him more
(35:22):
human and more authentic. Absolutely, he comes back, actually even
before he comes back, he really starts campaigning for his
his next seat, which actually is not allowed at the time.
You're you're not permitted. I mean, that's a breaking of
the rules. Right at the time, you weren't supposed to
if you were in the military do any political campaigning.
(35:46):
But um, as the rules didn't mean much earlier, they
didn't mean much later either. And he embarked on that
and in he defeated Howard McMurray in the general election
right in the as as Democrat and basically joined the
Senate at that point. He beat one of the iconic
(36:07):
characters in Wisconsin political history. So what the Kennedys are
to my native Massachusetts and what the Tafts were in Ohio,
A family called la fall Itt in Wisconsin were as
much of political titans. And there was the senior lafolltt
Um fighting Bob la Fallotte and his son, Young Bob.
(36:30):
A three term U S Senator. La Fallott was toppled
by Joe McCarthy La fall It was toppled by McCarthy
because again McCarthy did what he always did, which was
embellish where that was important. He also understood instinctively, McCarthy,
if you had something in your political resume that made
(36:50):
you vulnerable. John McCarthy was as as stute as anybody
in American political history at going to that weakness and
playing on it and la fall it was a little
bit out of touch. He had spent enough time three
terms in Washington, and McCarthy made him seem like he
was this tired old man, which is in fact what
he was. He was a very distinguished senator, but he
(37:12):
was also old, and he was also tired, and he
was also only came home to campaign after it was
too late. And McCarthy, this young ups start, realized that
if he could grab the right wing of the Republican
Party and they called them in Wisconsin stalwart Republicans, he
could get them behind him. The stalwarts hated Lafolett, and
(37:34):
McCarthy put himself into exactly the position to win. He
exploited every vulnerability of his opponent. He wins the nomination,
then he has an easier race to win against the Democrat,
and he goes to Washington, and I hate to keep
over using this as again, one of the least prepared
people to be a U. S senator has showed up
(37:57):
in the Senate and over his first couple of years
he showed that lack of preparation. Yea. This concludes episode
one of my two part series on Joe McCarthy. Thank
you and I hope you'll take a listen to the
second half of McCarthy's life and rise in political power
(38:19):
thanks to my guest Larry Tye. And if you'd like
to learn more about Joe McCarthy, check out his book Demagogue,
The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. You
could comment or ask me questions on Twitter at Dr
Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy. M D. Personology is a
production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Doctor
(38:40):
Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagin.
The Associate producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing
by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Joseph McCarthy
was a Republican U S Senator from the state of
Wisconsin from seven until his death in nineteen fifty seven.
He was the public face of the nineteen fifties fears
(00:22):
and resulting political activism during the United States versus Soviet
Union Cold War tensions regarding communists subversion in the United States.
He alleged that numerous Communists, Soviet spies, and sympathizers had
infiltrated the United States federal government, as well as academic universities,
(00:43):
Hollywood and other places, a practice that came to be
coined McCarthyism. Part of his practice was to use smear
tactics to attack the character or patriotism of his subject
and ultimately the Senate censure him for this. I'm doctor
Gale Saul, and this is Personalogy. My guest today is
(01:07):
journalist and author Larry Tye, who was a New York
Times bestselling author and author of the newly released Demagogue,
The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, as
well as the book Bobby Kennedy The Making of a
Liberal Icon. TAI runs the Boston based Health Coverage Fellowship,
which helps the media do a better job reporting on
(01:29):
critical issues like public health, mental health, and high tech medicine.
He was an award winning writer for The Boston Globe.
Joe McCarthy was born in Night on a farm in
Grand Shoote in Wisconsin, and that he was the fifth
(01:50):
of seven children. In terms of his home life in Wisconsin,
there was nothing extraordinary or remarkable, let's say about his
circum dances. It was a pretty typical farm life in
Wisconsin with parents who were Irish descendants Irish Americans. Um.
But maybe you could talk a little bit about that,
(02:12):
that family life and that early time and how it was.
It was formative for him from a very early age.
Joe McCarthy was both very competitive and very entrepreneurial. He
was competitive in that he was as soon as he
got his first pair of boxing gloves looking for anybody
to duke it out with in the family or in
(02:34):
the neighborhood. And he was entrepreneurial in that, at a
very young age, having graduated from grammar school, he went
out and became a chicken tycoon. And what that meant
was he had thousands of laying hens and he built
this little empire, and it worked brilliantly until he got sick,
(02:59):
and trust did his empire to some people to look
it over for a while, and a virus spread among
the birds and they died. And he went from being
a tycoon to being penniless, which is the natural state
of affairs in um small farms like his with big
families in Wisconsin, and that meant he had to reinvent himself,
(03:22):
and he reinvented himself by being a maven at a
store called Cashway, one of a series of stores that
were like a seven eleven, and again he stood out.
His store quickly became the best selling in that little
Cashway empire. Joe McCarthy showed that he didn't have to
(03:42):
have an education, that he could make a go of it,
and then at a point when he was about twenty
years old, he finally decided that he wanted to do more,
that maybe getting an education wasn't a bad idea. And
so I think a lot of people who look at
the caricatured view of Joe McCarthy think this wasn't a
very smart guy. He was a big, brawny, sort of
(04:03):
bully like guy, and in fact he was smart enough
that when he finally decided to go to high school,
he made it through four years in a single year,
which was extraordinary in which led him to college and
to the first lie of his life. To go back
for a second, a couple of really interesting things about
so what what could we see in this kid that
(04:25):
might have helped us understand how he would come to
be the kind of adult that he did. And a
couple of interesting points. One is the temperament that you
point out that he was as a kid, by all evidence,
extremely competitive and had certain kinds of ambition. The ambition
might have changed focus, you know, whether it was I
(04:47):
got to get done with high school in one year
or I'm going to make money as this chicken tycoon. Um,
But they were they were extraordinary feats in their own way,
and he was very driven in a pursuit of them,
and that the competitiveness sometimes manifested itself in as you
(05:08):
brought up this very aggressive form. So he was very
into boxing, and he thought nothing of you know, really
laying it all out there with child opponents essentially, But
he would also teach. He would also teach other people
to box, So he was complicated people when they think
(05:29):
of Joe McCarthy, right, they like to be very black
and white. They like to say, you know, he was
all a bad guy, or no, he wasn't a bad guy,
or he was all paranoid, or no he wasn't. But
you see even early on that he was a very
he was multidimensional. He could he could say I'm going
to teach you how to box, or he could pummel
you and knock you out, um and be highly highly aggressive.
(05:54):
And I think it's just important that we sort of
as we think about him, that keep that duality, you know,
these the different sides of him in mind. I think
it's important that we consider the family aspirations. The father
Tim came, bought all this land, uh, made a farm
of it. He'd already risen himself up from where he was.
(06:17):
They wanted their kids to be something and do something.
A completely different kind of family where aspirations were, would
you be able to sort of make money and take
care of yourself, let's say, um, and so he really
was the only child who showed the academic aptitude and
the kind of drive to go on and complete education
(06:39):
in a rapid way and and aspire even to college. Um,
that was not something typical for the family. Everything you
said is true, and I want to take three threads
that I think to find Joe's early life. Um. First
of all, you said in ending that the UM this
was not something that his parents saw as an aspiration
(07:00):
and for their kids, And that's absolutely true. And in fact,
Joe said in later life that it would have scared
the heck out of his mother if she had ever
seen him rise to the Senate. I mean, he was going,
not to mention becoming the national and international figure that
he became. But the three threads in his early life
that stayed with him throughout were Number One, ambition, sort
(07:23):
of highly competitive and ambitious, and that would have meant
something UM in and of itself, but it was combined
with real talent. So he had ambition and he had
the ability to see the ambition through and those might
have made him into a great figure of uh stature
(07:44):
in the country that we'd be looking at in a
revered way today if it wasn't for the third element
that was a part of his personality from very early on,
and that was opportunism, and that was the willingness to
do whatever it took to see that ambition through. It's
a sort of scary triumvit if you add natural talent,
(08:05):
the ambition that drives you to do something that's going
to put you in the limelight, and the willingness to
do anything, including embellish or outright lie, to get you
where you wanted to go. Those three were an amazing
combination for a politician to have and what made him
(08:28):
successful but also took him beyond to the point where
you and I seventy years later talking about him, because
he made a name for himself and he became an ism,
which is an unusual thing to become. It's such a
good point about opportunism, which touches on the question of
what is your moral compass. Moral compasses are formed initially
(08:50):
in childhood and continue to develop, you know, I'd say,
an early adulthood, and then they're they're pretty formed by then.
So your family of origin has a big impact on
your moral compass. And in fact, he had what at
the time would be called, you know, god fearing of
Christian Irish Catholic parents. They were not a super religious family,
(09:15):
but they were a religious family and Catholicism was important.
But as his parents saw him not necessarily, let's say,
following the rules all the time in terms of his
early business, and sometimes breaking the rules for his betterment. Today,
(09:35):
no one would be allowed to complete high school in
one year. That would just not be allowed, even if
you academically could do it. Skirting the rules for his
betterment was something that seemed to be acceptable and approved
of by the family and not really questioned. Judging from
things that his siblings said about him over the years
and judging from things that his father did to enable
(09:57):
what he did over the years, I think his family
were partly in awe of him. He was by far
the most charismatic. He from an early age made clear
that he was the one who was going to put
the McCarthy name somewhere. I don't think they ever saw
it being quite where it ended up. But I also
think that there was um in a way that any
(10:18):
family of that size and of that sort of um
Middle America solidity. There was a sense that they were
going to support him no matter what he did, and
they were going to over the years justify what he did,
no matter what he did. And I think they were
a bit in awe of and I don't think they
quite knew what to do with him, just like most
(10:40):
people who came in contact with him over the years.
One of the things that was another thread that ran
through his entire life, starting with his college career and
even in high school and going all the way through
the end of his life, was um that people perpetually
underestimated him. He looked more like a puge list and
(11:00):
like a politician, and he looked like somebody who didn't
have the looks or the charisma to rise to become
the second most popular person in America. And so that
was part of what he used to get ahead, I think,
was having people perpetually underestimate just how smart he was
(11:22):
and just how ruthless he was. Let's take a quick
break here. We'll be back in a moment. Didn't bed
bed bed beddy, bed and Beddy. He did go to college.
Actually college was sort of a blend with he started
(11:45):
off in the engineering that performed very poorly. I think
it's worth noting that even though his high school principle said,
you know, this kid is unbelievable, and you know, wrote
letters that you know that this kid has done something
that's never been on and intellectually, it's incredible. Then when
he got to college, he was a pretty mediocre to
(12:05):
not very good student, and certainly engineering was not for him.
He made this pivot to law, which he thought would
be easier and he would be able to do better
in and perhaps it interested him more. And he was
a very average student. He was an average student, but
I think that was partly because he didn't have the
(12:26):
capacity or the interest in working hard. He would do
something amazing. So, as any of your listeners know who
know anything about law school education, they are generally big
classes and you generally have you break down into small
study groups, and it's that group that you bond with,
that group that you learned through. And Joe was brilliant
at doing no work during the semester, at showing up
(12:48):
its study group and being able to absorb everything his
classmates were saying. And I think that suggested the same
capacity he had in high school. He was a sponge.
He could absorb in a extraordinary amount of material, and
especially in a program like law, where it was absorbing
and sort of giving back. And it was a good
(13:09):
law school, but not a great law school. So he
did fine, and he did find at most courses um
he did fairly mediocre, and most of the courses on
ethics and morality in college, but he did well enough
to get by. He was somebody who was law school
classmates years later remembered not for his intellectual rigor and
(13:33):
but it was for his ability to soak it all
in in the end and do what it took to
get by. And I think that that is in a way, again,
knowing what we know about his later career, when we
go back and look at the earlier career, we can
say that that was classic Joe McCarthy, bending the rules,
doing four years in one year, by absorbing what went
(13:56):
on and study group and not what went on in
the classroom, by taking through jobs when he was in college,
and being willing to do anything to earn the extra
buck to give him a little financial freedom, and be
able to take out the women that he was taking
out and show them um a good time. But he
also did something which was kind of extraordinary. If you
(14:18):
read anything that he said or wrote during the years
about what had happened when he was in college, you
would think that his parents cut him loose and said
you make your own way. Where we find out later
when we look at some of his personal records that
in fact his father was helping him in school and
never getting credit for it, because that didn't fit with
the image of self made Joe McCarthy who goes out
(14:41):
and puts himself through school with three jobs. And he
was even at a very young age, looking to a
resume that he knew would someday be important to him
when he was going to go on and do great things,
and he was building that resume through some combination of
accomplishment an embellishment. You can even argue, because of course
(15:02):
this was before he really even tried to turn to
political life, or was or there was evidence that he
was planning on political life, that just as important to
him was maintaining enough denial and compartmentalization that he could
hold on to his own personal ideal that he was
(15:23):
a self made man. That seemed to be important in
the image that he was projecting even for himself. That
his father didn't help him who he did, that he
didn't get loans from friends, which he did, that you know,
people weren't providing him the information that he could sponge up,
which is exactly what happened. And along with that you
(15:44):
see evidence of the beginnings of this. I'll call it hedonism.
He really liked to take out women. Uh number of
women reported it was fun, but not so enjoyable because
at the end of the day he was like an octopus.
He didn't treat me so nicely. In college, especially, he
wanted to be the big guy on campus. He was
(16:04):
willing to do, even at that early stage in college,
whatever it took. And what that meant was when he
ran for the head of his um law school class,
when he wanted to be president of his law school class,
he made a deal with this guy named Charles Kerran,
who was the guy who was running against him, and
the deal was in a way that a mensch would do.
(16:26):
Will each vote for one another. We're not going to
vote for ourselves, and then we'll see what the rest
of the class does. So they did that. There was
a tie vote, and then in the second round McCarthy
won by two votes, and when they went back and
sort of tried to understand what had happened, he won
because he voted for himself. And when he was confronted
(16:48):
by Charles Kurrn and said, how could you do that?
McCarthy said, in all my campaigning, I realized I really
was the guy, the better man, as I was telling
people that I was, and you wouldn't want me to
vote for somebody other than the better man. Now, what
that really was was the classic sort of spin on
the fact did he just wanted to win and he
would do what it took to win. And I'm surprised.
(17:09):
The only surprise in the story to me is not
what he did in the second round, but that he
actually voted for Current in the first round. He played
by the rules once and that was an unusual thing.
I think. The other sort of surprising thing, but again
a testament to the kind of man that he was,
is that after that he managed to maintain the friendship too.
(17:30):
He managed to then bend over backwards and be giving
in some other way too. I think he he said, here,
take my car. I'm going to help drive you your
father sick. There was a story where he basically helped
out the other guy to say, like, look, I I
did do this, but like I really I I met
well and I still want to be your friend. His
charisma and his ability to do that even after and
(17:54):
this is really I think is important because when we
later go on to look at what he does to
people he is able to maintain this splitting is it
would be the psychological term that he is divided into.
He only sees the side he wants to see. I'm
not that bad guy who basically cheated, right, I voted
(18:14):
for myself after we made a deal that we wouldn't
do that. I'm this good guy who will help you
in a dire situation, and I'm really your friend. And
he managed to perpetuate those things not only in his
head but externally and bring them to fruition. He did.
And so the psychological term is splitting. The journalistic term
(18:35):
that I'm comfortable with is contradictions. And he was most
interesting people in the world have contradictions. Very few have
as big as split or set of contradictions as Joe McCarthy.
And so what he did perpetually throughout his early life
and his career was he would savage somebody on the
(18:57):
witness stand and then invite him out for a drink afterwards.
He thought that it was all part of a game,
and don't you get the game? And I'm still a
good guy. And I think that that helps explain why
the state of Wisconsin ended up sending him to the
Senate twice, and why he rose to be as popular
as he was. He had this measure of charisma. Um,
(19:20):
he was the guy. He was a guy that I
would love to have gone out for a drink with.
I wouldn't have wanted to get up in front of
him and a witness stand. I wouldn't have wanted to
have to cover him. But he was a guy who
really was a regular guy except when he was bulldozing
through you to get what he wanted. And that set
(19:43):
of contradictions was extraordinary. People in later life would say
he spent half of his life as a bulldog and
the other half as a lapdog, and managing to do
both for as long and as successfully as he did
on the one hand, as brilliant and in the their hand,
I think spelled his ultimate undoing. You can't have that
(20:03):
kind of split a contradiction and last forever. So we've
seen this, you know, historically, again and again in certain figures.
They're usually leaders who preach something in a in an
incredibly strong and dogged manner. We could be talking about um,
you know, Mark Foley, head of of of of Child
(20:27):
and Protective services, you know, within the government, but you
know who turned out to be having relations with young interns.
We could be talking about Haggardy and being a reverend preaching,
you know, intensely strongly the importance of you know, anti homosexual,
anti drugs, anti all these things, and doing all of
(20:48):
those things, so that the urge, psychologically speaking, the urge
to do and Joe McCarthy's case, to be very aggressive,
so aggressive that you will mow over and destroy any
one for your betterment. But the part of your mind
that says, well, that's that's not okay. I mean, at
some level, I know that's not okay. And I'm not
(21:09):
that bad guy. I'm not the bad guy who wants
to do that thing. I'm really this other good guy
who will take you out for a drink and be
your buddy, and so that makes it okay. And when
those two things are so divided and not integrated in
a person's mind, their ability to behave and really go
to the max on their unacceptable behaviors is sort of
(21:32):
is sort of set free. I guess I'll say it's
unexamined and and and certainly that seems to be to
have been the case, and I think this just sets
the table. We can see how this sets the table
for him to go on and do some of the
Now we'll go, well, let's let's turn to some of
those things, will turn to his rise. Can I just
(21:52):
make one comment on what you said. You're the mental
health expert, and I don't pretend to be able to
psychoanalyze him as effectively as you do. But in most politicians,
when there is that kind of split, the public persona
is the good guy and then we find out that
there was something dark about them. What's unusual about McCarthy
(22:12):
as it was flipped, the public persona was the dark guy,
and the surprises that he had a good guy in him.
And that was part of what I was intrigued about
finding out about. When I was writing this book, I
had heard from a woman who to me is um
part of a couple that were the most iconic liberals
(22:33):
of my generation, a woman named Ethel Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy's widow,
that Joe McCarthy. She said to me when I was
interviewing her for my biography of Bobby Kennedy. She said,
Joe McCarthy might have been a monster. Too much of America.
But to us, he was just good, plain fun, And
I thought, geez, that's the side of him that I
(22:53):
didn't know existed. I'm not hearing it from some um
fellow traveling uh conservative, I'm hearing it from this iconic
liberal um matriarch. And I want to see what that
side was. I want to see if I can understand
it and show that John McCarthy wasn't all of what
we thought he was. Well, the ability for many people
(23:15):
who split to frame their dark side as good is
not unusual. And so if you convince yourself that, uh,
the being with an intern is caring for them too. Um,
if you you know, if you if you can convince
(23:37):
yourself that what you're doing is really and in the
case of Joe mccarnthy, righteous and protective and uh, you know,
even if somewhere else you know it's for your own good.
You know, these things can become very compartmentalized. So, um,
it may become acceptable, it may become accept more than acceptable,
(23:58):
maybe evidence to yourself that you are are being as
good as they get, you know, so to speak. Let's
take a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment.
Bedding bed beddy bed and bedding. He graduated law school,
(24:22):
he opens the practice, um, he joins a law firm.
This is in the mid nineteen thirties. He develops a
bit of a reputation right for being quick and efficient.
He developed that reputation as a lawyer um being willing
to also do anything, keep his office open, his light
(24:43):
burning much of the night. And he also develops a reputation,
or I should say, refines a reputation, because we already
talked about that reputation of being willing to do anything,
and that included taking on his senior law partner, the
guy who gave him his big break. Joe wanted to
run for office, and so the disc guy. So I
(25:05):
should say first, the first office Joe ever ran for
was as district attorney, and he may have been one
of the least qualified people to ever run for that office,
a young lawyer, no real experience, but nothing was going
to hold him back, and he runs for district attorney
in an unusual way. Joe McCarthy we think of in
what we're given in the history books as one of
(25:26):
the icons of the American right. But back then he
runs for office as a Democrat, as an avid flaming
New dealer as a big supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. And
there was only one problem, and the part of Wisconsin
where he was doing that, Democrats didn't get elected, and
certainly flaming New Dealers didn't get elected. And McCarthy very
(25:48):
quickly understood again this motto that I will keep coming
back to whatever it takes. And what it took was
sometime maybe in the middle of the night, when nobody
was looking, you go and you change your party registration
from Democrat to Republican, and then you pick an office
as your first office when you've made that change, a
(26:08):
nonpartisan office that is a circuit court judge. And the
fact that your um sponsor and legal partner wants to
have that same office and deserves it, who cares? You
let him know at the last minute, just as you're announcing,
and then you barrel over him. And this guy named
(26:28):
Mike Eberline his law partner. Depending on the story. Over
the years, when McCarthy started getting more powerful, Eberline started
getting less candid about admitting how outraged he was that
Joe McCarthy had dissed him. But you don't have to
listen to what he said. You watch what he did.
And suddenly Joe McCarthy wasn't his buddy and his law partner.
(26:51):
And McCarthy wins that office. He wins it partly by
making an issue of the age of the income bent,
and he wins it by embellishing the age of the
incumbent was old enough that it could have become an issue,
but he picks an older age. The income over time
that the incumbent made sounds like a whole lot of
(27:12):
money if you add up ten years and you put
it together, and you say, was he worth not five
thousand dollars a year? But was he worth fifty dollars?
And he made it seem like this pillar of the
legal community and of the general community was somehow out
scamming the public. And it worked, and he not only
(27:34):
one office, but he converted that incumbent into what the
incumbents son called Joe McCarthy's first victim. Overnight, the incumbent
went from being this long serving judge to being this
scammer of the public. And it wasn't true. And it
was a sign of McCarthy's willingness to win office, to
(27:57):
do or say just about anything to return for a
second to McCarthy's moral compass, the use of alternative facts,
the birth of alternative facts, and frankly, these were outright lies,
not facts, and he it's not something that had typically
(28:18):
been done, but he took to that. And in addition
to doing what he did to his law partner, Um,
let's just discuss the idea of no allegiance to one's ideology.
Did Joe McCarthy have an ideology? So I want to
be consistent as a biographer. And when I wrote a
(28:39):
biography on Bobby Kennedy, I talked about it being growth
that he went from being a Joe McCarthy cold warrior
at the beginning of his career to becoming an iconic
liberal figure. And I would love to be able to
say what Joe McCarthy was doing was growing in his
move from being a liberal to being a conservative. I
think what he was doing was showing that on that
(29:00):
moral compass that you were talking about. I don't know
if there is a dial point in that compass of
a morality, but if there was, he was a moral
I think his moral compass was to get ahead, to
see his ambition rewarded, to get a limelight, and he
would have probably if he were here. As part of
(29:21):
this conversation we're having now said that he wanted that
so that he could do important things and that it
didn't matter whether he came from the right or the left.
If you got enough power, he could change things. Uh,
that doesn't wash. And the truth is that his change
was because that was what it took to get elected.
And you could have argued with Bobby Kennedy then, in fact,
(29:45):
his electability would have been stronger had he stayed closer
to the middle of the road instead of going out
there on the political left where he felt more comfortable.
In later life, John McCarthy went wherever the ground was
most solid in his electoral drive. And I want to
just say one other things. So we were talking about
the word embellishment. The reason I didn't call that a
(30:07):
lie is because I want to save lies for the
really big ones he told. But it was a lie.
And what McCarthy learned brilliantly, and I think it remains
true to this day, is you don't get punished anymore
for telling a big lie than you do a little lie.
And so over time he learned to tell whoppers. But
in the early days. It was more a stretching than
(30:31):
an ignoring of the facts. He goes on to become
a judge, and in that setting he he gets this
reputation for clearing the backlog quickly. He gets a reputation
for granting divorces quickly, which is pretty fascinating for somebody
from his religious background. I'll just say that that seems
(30:53):
like a real departure there. And then he also goes
on to enlist in the war, even though as a
judge he he was technically exempt. Uh. It seems as
though he thinks this will be good for him reputationally too.
He sees that being an enlisted man actually has been
(31:16):
helpful to other people who are trying to launch political careers,
and he he does do that. And again we see
during his time um in the South Pacific, we we
see this duality of on the one hand, he's claiming
he goes on to claim he's things that he wasn't
and he did things that he didn't because it because
(31:39):
he's creating this narrative of you know, being you know,
being a private being at the lowest rung, working his
way up being in the most dangerous tail gunner position
and so on. That's all important, even if it's untrue.
But he also there seems to be a lot of guys,
as you're pointing out, who say, well, now he was
really you know, he served well. He he was part
(32:02):
of our group as we watched each other's back and
like I, I want to be I want to be
serving with Joe McCarthy. Yeah. So one of the things, UM,
that I was lucky in getting when I was writing
the book was UM. For seventy years, since McCarthy died, UM,
people have been trying to get access to his personal
and professional papers. His widow left them to his alma mater,
(32:25):
Marquette University, and they've been saying forever because that's what
the family has been saying, that nobody could see them,
and not because I'm charming, but because I was lucky
or a pin on the neck and they wanted to
get rid of me. I got to see those papers,
and one of the things in those papers was his
handwritten wartime diaries and Joe McCarthy when he first ran
(32:48):
for higher office, he ran calling himself tailgunner Joe, saying
that I was a war hero and I'm coming back
now and I'm going to do for the country what
I did for my country in the South Pacific. And
over the years journalists doubted that that was true, and
they said the medals he got were for political reasons.
Um the television networks actually did an entire hour long
(33:11):
documentary called Tailgunner Joe, making fun of him. That became
a caricature. What we see, shockingly in those wartime diaries
was that he documented every time he went up and
flew as a tailgunner. His official assignment was as a
land based intelligence officer, but he raised his hand and
(33:33):
he said I'll go, and he volunteered for missions that
could have gotten him killed. He volunteered for missions where
he actually was a tailgunner, and his squad mates in
later years wrote letters saying he did what he said
he did. Now that raises two interesting questions. One is,
if you tell enough lies, nobody is going to believe
you when you tell the truth. But in a way,
(33:55):
the more interesting psychological question to me is, if he
had these letters, and if he had the diaries that
showed that he was telling the truth, why didn't he
hold them up and say here is what I'm saying.
They're making fun of me, but I can prove that
it was true, and I think, wanting to give him
the benefit of the doubt, that he actually decided that
(34:17):
much as he was about as shameless a character as
there was, that he decided some things were beyond the pale,
and he took seriously enough what he had done in
the Marines that if it required him to stoop to
the level of having to show his handwritten diaries or
point to his buddies saying he wasn't a liar, that
(34:39):
would have been almost as embarrassing as being called a liar.
And he wasn't going to do that, and he's not
here to for me to ask, and he never said
in his personal papers. Here's why I'm not pointing out
that some of these actually showed that I was telling
the truth. But we go back after the fact and
try to figure out what he was thinking, and I
want to give him the benefit of that doubt. And
(35:00):
I think that partly in writing a biography, anybody tries
to take a historic and caricatured character and make them
a little more true to life and flesh and blood.
And as we see that there are many things in
McCarthy's record that make him even more despicable than we thought.
We have to acknowledge the things that make him more
(35:22):
human and more authentic. Absolutely, he comes back, actually even
before he comes back, he really starts campaigning for his
his next seat, which actually is not allowed at the time.
You're you're not permitted. I mean, that's a breaking of
the rules. Right at the time, you weren't supposed to
if you were in the military do any political campaigning.
(35:46):
But um, as the rules didn't mean much earlier, they
didn't mean much later either. And he embarked on that
and in he defeated Howard McMurray in the general election
right in the as as Democrat and basically joined the
Senate at that point. He beat one of the iconic
(36:07):
characters in Wisconsin political history. So what the Kennedys are
to my native Massachusetts and what the Tafts were in Ohio,
A family called la fall Itt in Wisconsin were as
much of political titans. And there was the senior lafolltt
Um fighting Bob la Fallotte and his son, Young Bob.
(36:30):
A three term U S Senator. La Fallott was toppled
by Joe McCarthy La fall It was toppled by McCarthy
because again McCarthy did what he always did, which was
embellish where that was important. He also understood instinctively, McCarthy,
if you had something in your political resume that made
(36:50):
you vulnerable. John McCarthy was as as stute as anybody
in American political history at going to that weakness and
playing on it and la fall it was a little
bit out of touch. He had spent enough time three
terms in Washington, and McCarthy made him seem like he
was this tired old man, which is in fact what
he was. He was a very distinguished senator, but he
(37:12):
was also old, and he was also tired, and he
was also only came home to campaign after it was
too late. And McCarthy, this young ups start, realized that
if he could grab the right wing of the Republican
Party and they called them in Wisconsin stalwart Republicans, he
could get them behind him. The stalwarts hated Lafolett, and
(37:34):
McCarthy put himself into exactly the position to win. He
exploited every vulnerability of his opponent. He wins the nomination,
then he has an easier race to win against the Democrat,
and he goes to Washington, and I hate to keep
over using this as again, one of the least prepared
people to be a U. S senator has showed up
(37:57):
in the Senate and over his first couple of years
he showed that lack of preparation. Yea. This concludes episode
one of my two part series on Joe McCarthy. Thank
you and I hope you'll take a listen to the
second half of McCarthy's life and rise in political power
(38:19):
thanks to my guest Larry Tye. And if you'd like
to learn more about Joe McCarthy, check out his book Demagogue,
The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. You
could comment or ask me questions on Twitter at Dr
Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy. M D. Personology is a
production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Doctor
(38:40):
Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagin.
The Associate producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing
by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
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