October 19, 2020 • 43 mins
Joe McCarthy was a U.S. republican senator from Wisconsin who from the late 1940's through much of the 1950s championed the idea that there was rampant communist subversion in various institutions and individuals in the United States, an attack campaign which came to be known as McCarthyism.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back
to part two of Joe McCarthy, who has rapidly risen
to the role of U S. Senator of Wisconsin. Initially
seen as a moderate Republican, his first few years as
(00:21):
senator were not especially remarkable. He was noted, however, for
being an excellent orator, but his reputation would soon change.
I'm doctor Gale Salts, and this is Personology. My guest
again today is journalist and author Larry Tye, a New
York Times bestselling author and author of newly released Demagogue,
(00:43):
The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. We've
sort of talked about the groundwork as to why Joe
McCarthy might have been the right person characteriologically to embark
on what he ultimately did. But there was also, you
(01:05):
have to say, somewhat of a right person at the
right time and right place. Right. So it so happened
that in during the Cold War Jitters rising Uh, the
House un American Activities Committee becomes a permanent House committee
having nothing to do with Joe McCarthy himself, so that
(01:28):
the idea of investigating communist subterfuge becomes a reality in
the Senate at that time, and concerns about the Cold
War means that the American public is very comfortable and
ready to buy into the concern that Communism has to
(01:49):
be ferreted out in any way possible. So I think
it goes back to the word opportunists, and there are
two sides to that word. One is recognizing the opportunity
and the other is willingness to exploit it. The opportunity
was there, and that we were I don't know what
kind of language I can use here, but we were
scared as heck in terms of what was going on
in the world. There was a real threat off in
(02:11):
the Soviet Union, and there was a real sense in
America that we could go to nuclear war and kids
would very shortly be taught on how to duck and
cover under their desks. That was the response if there
was a nuclear attack and the time was ripe for
somebody to come along. And John McCarthy brilliantly understood that fear,
(02:32):
and like any good opportunist or any good demagogue, knew
how to play for it, played to it, and he
played to it not with a realistic and sensible and
boring response He played to it with dynamism. He played
to it with dynamite. He played to it by saying
(02:52):
things that weren't true, but that he knew his listeners
would want to hear. And he understood that just saying
that there were maybe traders out there, Um, if you
did it in general terms, wasn't going to mean anything.
What you had to do was he had to name
the traders, and you had to count the traders. And
he knew how to, in a wild West kind of way,
(03:16):
go in and really shake things up. You know. He
stoked general paranoia, right, And of course, as the saying goes,
just because your paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies.
So we did have enemies, and people were fearful about that,
which does tend to ignite more paranoia because there's always
(03:39):
a kernel of seeds of truth there. And the question,
you know, so paranoid is a term that went along
with Joe McCarthy for for many years, uh following his
death even and the question is really whether we don't
see a lot of evidence of paranoia before this time, right,
(04:02):
we don't see him walking around supposing enemies all over
the place and being paranoid, which is interesting because when
someone has let's say, paranoid personality disorder, you would expect
to see it much earlier than this in their life. Uh,
It's it's true that a traumatic event can happen that
can change someone's trajectory and make them more paranoid. And
(04:24):
it's also true, and I think this does become a
question that substance use and abuse can also heighten a
person's paranoia. And so we do have to wonder whether
ultimately that comes to bear in terms of the degree
of paranoia that he seems to exhibit. But it does
seem at this juncture that it's more likely that, as
(04:44):
you said, he sees an opportunity, and he sees that
the general paranoia that can be ignited and inflamed can
be an avenue for him playing the role of rescuer
protector and therefore holding the power holding being the gatekeeper
and UM, and that's just that is very interesting. Whether
(05:07):
that ultimately later dovetails with his increasing drinking and as
we'll get to later, the use of other substances that
may have heightened his thoughts around this UM is also
something worth positing. But let's move as you said to UM, Really,
his launch into McCarthy is m like his launch into
(05:31):
this whole prosecutorial role. Yes, so I want to just
revisit paranoia for one second and we can come back
to this later. UM. I would say that while Um
he was often called a paranoid, especially in the early days,
UM he was anything, but he was playing to other
people's paranoia. But he was seeing things clearly, and he
(05:54):
knew that he didn't believe in what he was saying.
I'd love to take your listeners to a moment where
I think McCarthy is m was born, and that moment
was in February of nineteen fifty. There is a tradition
in Republican circles in America that the one night that
is best to raise money is when you are honoring
(06:14):
the birthday of the patron saint to the Republican Party,
Abe Lincoln, And they're famously called Lincoln Day dinners. And
if you're a prominent U. S. Senator, you get invited
to places like New York and Boston and San Francisco
and Chicago. If you're Joe McCarthy, the consummate backbencher who
looks like he's on his way to defeat. After one term,
(06:36):
you get invited to Wheeling, West Virginia, which is where
he gave the speech. That night, he shows up with
a briefcase with two speeches. One of them is a
snoozer of a speech on national housing policy that he
actually knew something about, and had he picked that speech
that night to deliver you and I seventy years later,
(06:56):
wouldn't be paying attention to Joe McCarthy. But instead he
grabbed the other speech in his briefcase, and that is
a speech on a subject that he knows arguably less
about than any other member of the U. S. Senate
in that year of nineteen fifty, and that's a speech
on the communist threat not in the Soviet Union, but
behind every pillar in the U. S. State Department. So
(07:19):
he grabs a sheaf of papers and he waves it
around like this in the air, saying, I have in
my hand the list of two hundred and five subversives
in the State Department, and I have the actual names,
and I know the jobs they have, and I'm going
to call on the government to route these people out.
(07:42):
And it was a passionate speech, and it was a
brilliant speech, and it was, as his fellow senators would
later conclude, a fraud in a hoax because a he
had I don't know what he had in his hand.
His friends have speculated that it could have been that
day's racing sheet. But what it was it wasn't a
list of two hundred and five subversives in the government.
(08:05):
What it probably was was a list, a recycled list,
based on the things that I saw in his archives,
a recycled list of the House on American Activities and
other early first generation Red hunters in America. Many of
the people who we actually had names of were people
(08:27):
who no longer worked for the State Department, or who
had had a sister or a brother in law, or
their own association with left wing activities twenty years before.
They were not Flaming spies. Most of the twenty four
Carrot spies had been rooted out long before Joe McCarthy
(08:47):
joined the hunt, most of the ones. When we got
to see the Russian archives, most of the spies who
were still there, Joe McCarthy wouldn't have recognized if he
had tripped over them in the dark on the way
to his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. But what happened
two days after his speech was he was on page
one of every newspaper in America. He had the Truman
(09:09):
administration on the defensive, and he never turned back. That
was the moment where he realized this was the issue
that was going to bring him the limelight. And if
there was a moment where McCarthy ism was given birth,
it was in front of that audience of mine operators
and whoever else was there that night who didn't recognize
(09:30):
what was going on and didn't recognize for sure that
a crusade like we had not seen in a long
time in America was being born. You mentioned, who knows
what those papers were in his hand, Maybe they were
race sheets. I should mention that actually Joe McCarthy was
a gambler. He he liked to bet, He bet in
(09:52):
all kinds of ways, and and that's just important to
keep in mind. Well clearly that that night he bet
on himself and uh and one and the thrill of
the wind, whether we're talking about horse races or his
individual political races or you know, political moments, the reward
(10:12):
of that was addictive. I'm gonna I'm gonna say addictive
for Joe McCarthy. He had Um. You know, some people
from a neuro lot and from a neurological point of view,
are more susceptible to addiction than others. There is something
about their dopamine, the neurotransmitter dopamine of reward, that reward
(10:35):
system that is primed to take off and super reward.
Whether it's a gambling win, whether it's with substance use
and addiction to alcohol or drugs, or whether even it's
something like a political win. But the thing that gives
you that dopamine high is just irresistible. And that seemed
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to be a really important feature that we see in
many different ways, the ways in which he was I'll
almost say a slave to his dopamine system, um, and
how that drove a lot of behaviors for him. But
upon this win this night, as you said, there was
no turning back. And it's interesting because from a concrete
point of view, you know, is there any evidence that
(11:19):
he wanted to be president, that he wanted to and
of the words move into into that position of power
or what was the end goal? So there was no
end goal, and that to me is one of the
fascinating things and it is reminiscent of what we see
maybe going on today. That the goal was to get
power and hold on to power. It was not what
you would do with it, whether he ever wanted to
be president. Every time he would deny it to one person,
(11:41):
he tells somebody else he did. I saw a wonderful
check that had never been cashed to the McCarthy for
President committee in his um personal papers. But I want
to just say one more thing about the addiction. You
talked about it compellingly from a mental health point of view.
I want to say that in later years, when McCarthy
went after not just communists, but he went after gays
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and lesbians in government, he said that the reason he
was doing that was because they're being closeted where their
sexual orientation made them vulnerable to blackmail by Soviet operatives.
I think Joe McCarthy's addictions made him vulnerable. His gambling
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addiction is what he was doing with his money, his
alcohol consumption, all of those are things that made him
more vulnerable than all the people he was targeting for
their alleged vulnerabilities. And it is one more way where
we see hypocrisy defining what he did. But that's another
element I think of opportunism, well, hypocrisy, but what I
(12:49):
would call projection, right, these things within himself. Um, I mean,
he was the one being the bad guy, He was
the one lying, He was the one destroying other people's lives,
and he projected all of this out and including as
you said, the addictions and the self destructive and and
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stigmatized behaviors that he was committing. All of this was
projected out. It's I'm not the problem. Other people are
the problem, right. Other people are the spies, the bad guys,
the self destructive guys, the stigmatized guys, and and that
was a huge part of his m O. I guess
(13:31):
I'll say that he that he needed to project all
these things outward and he but at the same time, sadly,
for many other people in this country. Again, his moral
compass didn't seem to make him sympathetic at all or
empathetic at all in terms of destroying other people's lives.
He was sympathetic and empathetic only when he was going
(13:52):
out for the drink after he had destroyed them during
the day, and when he was taking him out and
being their buddy afterwards. He was a bit empathetic. But
in terms of the randomness of this whole um launch
of McCarthy is um, I want to just it is
partly fatuous, but I also think it partly suggests how
random the whole thing was. One of the many ways
(14:12):
his numbers that first week kept changing between especially two
numbers two communists or fifty seven, and the fifty seven,
it was suggested, could have come he was a big
Hamburger eater, and it suggested that he might have gone
in and used Hines fifty seven sauce and that number
stuck in his mind. And that wouldn't surprise me because
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the numbers didn't mean much of anything, and it could
have come from anywhere. Let's take a quick break here.
We'll be back in a moment, bed bed bedding. It
(14:56):
is important for people to understand it was not unusual
will for him to have a multi drink lunch, um
to show up on the floor after lunch appearing drunk,
to show up the next day in the Senate appearing hungover,
and um somewhere in this time period became this really
(15:19):
unfathomable story that it seemed he was probably at some
point started to use opiates. It may have started because
he he was prescribed them for pain. He had a
lot of accidents, he broke a bone or or something
like that. Um it may have started because he had
terrible hangovers the next day and was looking for some relief.
(15:39):
But UM, the story of the secrecy of his addiction,
the discovery by the head of the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics and his the the Federal Bureau of Narcotics being
convinced that they basically had to maintain his habit UH
(16:00):
to somehow protect the world or protect his ongoing crusade
against communism, provided him ongoing morphine via a Washington, d c.
Pharmacy and the impact of that secret because you have
to understand that if you think drug use and alcohol
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use or substance abuse is stigmatized today, which it is
a deeply, deeply stigmatized and not understood really as an illness,
the degree to which it was stigmatized in the nineteen
fifties is UH today pales in comparison. So I want
to push back a little bit. So what you said
about the morphine addiction, the opioid addiction UM was reported
(16:45):
in the newspapers, and it was in an unnamed way
by the guy who ran the drug agency, and Slinger
was his name. UM. He indicated that there was an
unnamed senior politician who this happened to, when everybody presumed
and it may have been that he was referring to McCarthy.
The pushback on that as I want to be fair
(17:05):
to him. There's enough that we know about what he
did that that would have shown up, I think given
the way his alcohol addiction did in his exhaustive records,
thousands of pages of records UM from Bethesda Naval Hospital.
And I didn't trust who am I a an old
health reporter to sit down and try to make sense
(17:27):
of that and whether there was really any sign of
addiction there. So I sat down with three doctors, one
of whom had just stepped down as dean of Harvard Medical,
A second was the editor in chief emeritus of New
England Journal, and the third was an expert on a
lot of the areas that McCarthy had suffered various medical woes.
And we actually there were four doctors and we sat
down and looked through every one of those pages, and
(17:49):
there was no evidence in his medical records. That doesn't
mean that he wasn't addicted, but it was no evidence
of that addiction. There was a jolting and upsetting set
of evidence of his alcohol addiction, and it was there
(18:11):
at an early stage from the moment that he was
condemned by his fellow senators. That alcohol consumption was quantified
in the records. And the only surprise to me is
that he lived as long as he did drinking that
much in the later years. But one of the interesting
things we now have access to all of the nine
(18:33):
thousand pages of transcripts of McCarthy's closed door hearings, two
thirds of his hearings were behind closed doors. He thought
that they would never become public, and they showed Joe
McCarthy unhinged when he thought nobody was watching. And one
of the many interesting things to me in those hearings,
it wasn't just how he abused the rights of witnesses
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and how somebody who appeared before him in a private
closed door session that was used as a staging ground
to see whether they wanted to bring him before the
public and if they were too good a witness, meaning
if they fought back effectively. They never showed up in
the public hearings. It was only the ones that he
knew that he could get the better of. But another thing,
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and it may be my looking for it, but I
don't think so. His demeanor changed from the morning sessions,
where I think he was sober, to the afternoon sessions,
where his fuse became shorter. He gave longer diet tribes
of speeches, and I think it was for two reasons.
I think one, his standard lunch was a burger, a
(19:39):
raw onion, and whiskey, and I think he had had
enough whiskey at lunch that he lost his temper more
quickly in the afternoon. But the other thing that I'm
intrigued about from his medical records is he had hemorrhoids.
And it may just have been if you sit for
two hours, the hemorrhoids are controllable. You start looking nasty
after four or five, have a six hours Okay, So
(20:02):
that's interesting. Well, certainly chronic pain of any sort could
definitely shorten your fuse, no question about it. And we
have to wonder why he went from really being I
guess we'd have to argue quite successful in his pursuits right,
in his effect and in his acruement of power in
(20:24):
terms of inflicting McCarthy ism on the on the nation
to to ultimately creating his own downfall by going for
the military, for going going at the army. And that
seems like such a clear, uh self destructive maneuver, I guess,
(20:44):
I'll say, or a very very poor decision that we
have to wonder what what was instrumental in that decision
for him that ultimately brought his downfall. So I think
what happened to Joe McCarthy is he began his crisis
sight of McCarthy is um with that accidental delivery of
a speech that he never knew was going to take
(21:06):
off in that way. And he knew in those early
days when he was raising those charges that he was
being an opportunist and that he didn't have to believe
in the things. I think over time, something strange happened
that he started to believe his own rhetoric in early
nineteen fifty four. By the time he took on the military,
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he had failed to see that he was overstepping that
you could bully people in the State Department, you could
get away with it at the Voice of America, you
could get away with it in the government printing office
because nobody particularly knew who those people were or cared
much about them. But there was an institution in America
that was too big to bully. That was the U. S. Army.
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That was also the moment when he did that, that
not just the army eventually developed a backbone and taking
him on, but our commander in chief, the one person
in America more popular than Joe McCarthy, This former war
hero Dwight Eisenhower, finally understood that the army was something
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he wasn't going to let McCarthy get away with bullying.
He understood that McCarthy was overstepping, and Joe McCarthy went
one step further. Had he not done that, he could
have gone on for years. But I also think what happened.
We look at his poll numbers and when he took
on the Army, the U. S. Senate, his old sub
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committee ended up running what was the most famous set
of hearings ever run. They were called the Army McCarthy Hearings.
At the start of those hearings, Joe McCarthy was at
a full fifty percent popularity. The gallop Poles said one
in every two Americans thought he was doing a great job.
By the end of those hearings in the summer of
nineteen fifty four, his numbers had gone from fifty down
(22:56):
to thirty. And anybody who's old enough to member those
hearings remembers one magical moment where a very smart, Harvard
trained lawyer from Boston named Joe Welch stood up and
said when McCarthy went after Welch's young associate and said
that he had been affiliated with a left wing legal group,
(23:17):
Joe Welch famously said, Senator, have you no decency? Well,
the truth is that was not the magical moment, and
the truth is Joe Welch had been waiting during the
entire hearings. He was a performer as well as a lawyer.
He had concocted that line and he was waiting for
a magical moment to deliver it. He picked a great moment.
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But the moment only worked because I think Americans had
been watching this guy, who they thought was their hero,
look more like the schoolyard bully on public television, and
they wanted to ask, Senator, have you no decency? And
so that line crystallized the question America had on its mind.
(23:58):
It showed the power of television to take a guy
who was a schoolyard bully and make him look that
way to the American public. And my book begins with
the line, this is a book about America's love affair
with bullies. But I also think that American knows when
a bully is really going too far and it will
(24:22):
part company. So I wrote a book in part about
one of the darkest chapters in American history. But I
think there is ultimately a very uplifting message of this
book and the book. The message is in American history
with our uniquely American strain of demagogues, from Huey Long
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and the Jew baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coglin to
Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. The lesson is that give
a demagogue enough rope and they will hang themselves. And
is part of the hanging that the overreach for power,
the displaying who you really are inside, and people finally
(25:08):
being able to grasp that. What what is the lesson
that we can we can learn today about ultimately? You know,
is it the doer or the dewey that ultimately catches
on to the demagoguery. Great question, It's both. I believe
two things about the American people. I believe we are
more naive and susceptible to bullying into demagoguery than we
(25:33):
think about ourselves, because we've shown it repeatedly, you know,
George Wallace, the lots of people who we've bought into.
But I think in the end it is partly demagogues
doing themselves in and it's partly America coming to its senses.
And I believe and I pray that throughout every phase
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of history, including today, that in the Americans recognize bullies.
And I think that we saw the first effective pushback
against some of the bullying that Donald Trump does come
from the US military. It came from when he did
(26:18):
over the last month things staging um, the photo opportunity
outside the White House, across the street from the park
and clearing people so we had a path to get there. UM.
The commanders in chief of the various arms services, I'm sorry,
the heads of the various armed services, UM, Defense secretaries, UM,
(26:41):
the heads of joint chiefs of staff passed in present.
When the military is bullied, they stand up and say
that institution you can't touch. And I think that I
think Donald Trump is a very smart politician, and he
probably learned a lesson there. But I also think that
he has almost to the letter, followed the Joe McCarthy
(27:03):
playbook in the last three and a half years. And
it is not a playbook that I'm as an author
writing about Joe McCarthy, and I say, jeez, he's using
that playbook because I want to sell books. Um, nobody
minds selling books. But it's also a playbook that had
a flesh and blood through line in the name of
a smart, arrogant lawyer named Roy Cone, who was Joe
(27:27):
McCarthy's protege and Donald Trump's tutor, and he showed Trump
all the things that a politician can learn from a
guy like Joe McCarthy. And Trump was a very able student.
Let's take a quick break here. We'll be back in
a moment. Be beddy, beddy, beddy. It certainly was Joe
(27:57):
McCarthy's end, so to speak. Senate did go on to
censure him. Um, he did lose his power. He became
sort of a nonentity at that point. He did marry.
He married actually this she was his assistant essentially, and
uh and his teammate and very involved in supporting his work, um,
(28:22):
supporting his ideology, and as you point out, kept his
letters and all the records and everything was part of
keeping those private following his death to protect I suspect
his reputation. She was highly invested, but it wasn't. It
(28:42):
was only I guess a couple of years after the
incident that you described where he is, and then he
has censured that he he becomes increasingly ill, he's hospitalized
more often. It seems like a little of this and
a little of that. No one's ever clear on a
exactly what it is, but um, he is all. He
(29:03):
dies in at the age of forty eight, really quite young.
But um, the doctors say it's hepatitis, a non infectious
hepatitis of undetermined ideology. And that's fascinating because of course
it seems very clear from all the medical records that
it is alcoholic hepatitis. And it's fascinating that even at
(29:29):
that time, given the stigma, there's this effort to hide
what he dies from. So appatitis was part of what
was induced by his alcoholism, but that's not the part
of the alcoholism that killed him, and the doctors had
to have been it was only Um. It wasn't that
long ago. It was the nineteen fifties, and they understood
(29:50):
alcoholism and the effects, and they understood what was happening
to him. And I think there were two reasons that
they told a fib about what he died of. That
the coroner listed acute hepatitis rather than alcoholism is the
cause of death, and that the press repeated that, and
that that's what's gone down in history. And I think
one reason was because they were trying to protect Um,
(30:14):
the family, But I think that UM and alcoholism they
thought as being an embarrassment. I think the other reason
was what you said that Um, it was the ultimate
stigma then and maybe now, to die of an addiction,
to die of something that it looks like people could
turn and say, geez, he did that to himself, rather
(30:35):
than he had a real disease, and alcoholism was a
legitimate disease as we know today. But I'm not sure
that if a politician died of what Joe McCarthy did
today that would be any more candid. And it, to
me was one of the many tragedies of his life
that this guy who, in Bobby Kennedy's words, had been
(30:58):
taken at a toboggan to the top the hill, was
going blind down the hill, and he was so excited
by the ride that the fact he was going to
crash and hurt himself at the bottom, I think never
occurred to him. From the day that he was censured
by the Senate, his political life was over, and I
would argue that his life generally was over. The only
(31:18):
good things he had in his life really from that
time on were an incredibly smart and loyal wife, Jane,
and an infant daughter that they adopted at the very end.
And it was too late, and it was too late
to pull him out of what I think may have
been a depression. Um. I think if he had any condition,
(31:39):
any diagnosable condition, and I'm no psychiatrists, um it may
have been a bipolar disease or what they call then
manic depression, because he had such Mannock highs and he
had such extraordinary lows, and it looked a bit classic
like that, But there were very few highs after his
(31:59):
censure by this in it at the end of nineteen
four and it was really sad what happened to him,
and we had it documented in a way that I'm
not sure, anybody, even public figures like McCarthy, had the
last two days of his life documented. There was a
medical orderly sitting with him, taking down every rant and
(32:20):
rave that McCarthy uttered, taking down every word. His nurse
or doctor said, so when we come along all this
time later, And there were all these conspiracy theories that
Joe McCarthy was murdered, that he died of some fantastic cause. Well,
unless that orderly was lying about everything that happened in
those last two days, he didn't die of any conspiracy.
(32:43):
He died of something hugely tragic, which was the d
T S and alcohol poisoning and a fever that spiked too.
I think it was a hundred and seven. And we
know that you bring up bipolar disorder, and of course
all these things were saying, you know, it's impossible, even
though I am a psychiatrist at a psychoanalyst, for me
(33:03):
to diagnose someone I've never met and based only on
retrospective information. But one would expect that if you did
have bipolar disorder, first of all, the hypomania romania might
put you in a position to be exactly the kind
of expansive thinker and grandiose character and highly creative and
(33:27):
verbal verbally able person that Joe McCarthy by all accounts appeared.
But we don't have documented periods of inability to function
at least until the very end there, you know, after
he was censured, but earlier in his life. There there
are no reported periods of a deep depression such that
(33:49):
one's functionality is impaired and one basically can't get out
of bed and you know, really performed that he seems
to be much more on the side of driven uh
and and and doing that being said, um, there there
are people who have bipolar disorder who have very little
in the way of depression, much more in the in
(34:11):
the vein of hypomania and mania. Um. But I would
have to tell you that if you saw someone like
this today in your office, it would be impossible to
really make an accurate diagnosis until you had treated their
substance abuse, because unfortunately, the substance abuse can make people
appear all of those hypomanic things you know, grandiose, aid
(34:33):
able and um and also depressed, because the reality is
alcohol is a depressant and it actually makes many people
feel both disinhibited in terms of their verbal capacities and
so on, but also feel at times in terms of
their mood, very depressed or fluctuating in mood. And so
(34:53):
it's it's very hard to separate those things. And yet
there's tremendous what we call comorbidity. Right, people who experience
one are very likely to experience the other. If you
are bipolar, you're probably more likely to unfortunately suffer from
substance addiction, UM or any other mood disorder or I
guess we could also argue in the case of Joe McCarthy,
(35:16):
you know how much of this was a potential personality
disorder in other words, that characterologically all along there were
patterns of behavior that were that worked for him in
certain ways but really didn't in others, and particularly anti
social characteristics. A man who enjoyed breaking the rules, I mean,
(35:39):
he liked taking risks, he liked breaking the rules. He
seemed to be devoid of empathy for others, truly if
they making them suffer was not something that pained him.
UM and these sort of You know, if he didn't
happen to have gone into government where he could be
spared the punishments. He is somebody who if he'd gone
(36:01):
into different directions, might have found himself really on the
wrong side of the law and often punished. The only
place I would take exception to what you said is
he did find himself from the wrong side of the law,
but he was protected because he was in the Senate,
and he did. I think that he liabeled lots of people.
He did all kinds of things. There was a hint
(36:24):
in the medical records from his time in the military
that when he went into the medical facilities in the
South Pacific, that doctors wrote different things. And I don't
know whether they were being coy in not being more explicit,
or they didn't know or what it was, but they
(36:44):
suggested maybe he's um suffering from some sort of serious
depression or fatigue, or maybe he's just lazy and doesn't
want to go back out. But there was a hint
that something was going on. But I think that probably
if there was anything they would have kept out of
the medical records, it was um a stigmatized yes depression
(37:08):
or any mental illness. And I wish that I could
have interviewed his doctors from back in the nineteen fifties,
because I think they knew more than they were letting on.
They were extraordinarily explicit about everything, um in terms of
his physical symptoms and the just hinting at things in
terms of mental issues. I think some of the clear
(37:30):
sense I had of what motivated him was an unpublished
memoir that his wife Jean wrote, called The Joe McCarthy.
I knew she never published it for understandable reasons why
she left it behind in his papers. I think what
happens to people when they leave hundreds or thousands of
boxes of papers is nobody has the energy to go
(37:53):
through and see what's there and what's not, and they
throw it all there and say we're putting it into
an archives and nobody's going to see it for a
very long time. And I think some of the greatest
insights into who Joe McCarthy was were not his insights,
because I don't think he was the kind of guy
who would ever sit down and offer any really candid
sense of himself. But she just in observing who he was,
(38:14):
even though she adored him. Um, she was smarter than
he was, as smart as I think he was. Um,
she was his biggest booster. She was a true, true
believer in the cause of McCarthy ism um, which they
would have defined as patriotism and all Americanism. Joe McCarthy
never objected to the term McCarthy ism, He just offered
(38:37):
his own definition for it. But in the end, um,
we are grateful to them because they left behind such
a record of who he was and what he did
and why he mattered and he mattered. There was a
reason my book had a one word title of demagogue,
and that is because while this is a biography of
(38:57):
Joe McCarthy, it is also a biography of this strain
of bullying that didn't end with him and didn't begin
with him, But we can use his life as a
way of understanding and battling back against it. And I
would add to that, there's a concept in my field
called folliado, the delusion of two, and sometimes we see
(39:20):
that literally in individuals. Two people come together and they're
in this delusional world that no one else can understand
because it's not real, it's psychotic, and but they both
believe it and they share this delusion. In Joe McCarthy's time,
he created this belief system right between himself and the
public at large, and they both had to buy into
(39:43):
it for him to continue the delusion, if you will,
or the belief system that he had going his own
McCarthy ism. When one person breaks out of that, it
ends the folia due essentially, And so can we learn
from that historically that that can occur, that that a
(40:04):
that a person can propagate a belief system that a
whole community can buy into, even if it's not accurate,
even if it's not correct. And I hope that we
all can learn that somebody who can gain that kind
of charismatic power of a cult leader of sorts uh,
(40:25):
can can propagate some really delusional thoughts that we can
all buy into. So I love that idea that they
propagate the thoughts, but that becomes scarier still when there
are two of them doing it and they're reinforcing one another.
And there was a very smart physicist from Harvard named
Ramsey who McCarthy invited to his house. Ramsey had been
(40:50):
on meet the Press, I think it was, and it
had been trying to take on um some of the
things that McCarthy had said in one of his hearings
and was being try by the press, and McCarthy felt
badly enough for him that he and his wife invited
Ramsey to come to a dinner party that night at
his house. And Ramsey was a smart guy who would
go on to win a Nobel Prize in physics. And
(41:11):
Ramsey said, at the end of that night, Joe McCarthy
alone didn't scare me. He was not dangerous. But when
you added Jean McCarthy, this incredibly smart, incredibly reinforcing person,
sort of taking all of his worst instincts and feeding
it back, that really scared me. And that could have
become a dictatorship. And I would suggest that there was
another duo in the McCarthy era that did the same
(41:36):
thing before Jean, or during the time the gene was
there doing it at home, there was a guy, Roy Cone,
who we talked about, who was doing it at work.
And Roy Kone was exceedingly smart, exceedingly arrogant, a moral
and he also encouraged all the worst instincts in Joe McCarthy.
And I want to just say one last thing about that,
(41:57):
which is, if roy Cone hadn't gotten the job as
chief council, which really meant chief of staff, the second
in line for that job was a guy named Bobby Kennedy.
And what would Joe McCarthy have been like? And we
can only imagine if it had been Bobby Kennedy there
instead of Roy Cohne helping set the path on where
(42:17):
Joe McCarthy was going. Well, sadly we will we will
never know, but it is important for us to think
about today. Who are the duos? Who do we give
our power to? Right? Who do we give over to
and and thereby join their their system, join their belief system. Well,
(42:43):
that wraps things up for this episode. Thanks for joining
me today. If you're interested in more information about Joe McCarthy,
check out Larry Tis book Demagogue, or for more on
the concepts of personology, you can also check out my
book The Power of Different The Link between Disorder and
Genie Us. Also make sure to follow me on Twitter
(43:03):
at doctor Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy m D Until
next time. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio.
The executive producers are Doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Clang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The Associate producer is
Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For
(43:25):
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. Welcome back
to part two of Joe McCarthy, who has rapidly risen
to the role of U S. Senator of Wisconsin. Initially
seen as a moderate Republican, his first few years as
(00:21):
senator were not especially remarkable. He was noted, however, for
being an excellent orator, but his reputation would soon change.
I'm doctor Gale Salts, and this is Personology. My guest
again today is journalist and author Larry Tye, a New
York Times bestselling author and author of newly released Demagogue,
(00:43):
The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. We've
sort of talked about the groundwork as to why Joe
McCarthy might have been the right person characteriologically to embark
on what he ultimately did. But there was also, you
(01:05):
have to say, somewhat of a right person at the
right time and right place. Right. So it so happened
that in during the Cold War Jitters rising Uh, the
House un American Activities Committee becomes a permanent House committee
having nothing to do with Joe McCarthy himself, so that
(01:28):
the idea of investigating communist subterfuge becomes a reality in
the Senate at that time, and concerns about the Cold
War means that the American public is very comfortable and
ready to buy into the concern that Communism has to
(01:49):
be ferreted out in any way possible. So I think
it goes back to the word opportunists, and there are
two sides to that word. One is recognizing the opportunity
and the other is willingness to exploit it. The opportunity
was there, and that we were I don't know what
kind of language I can use here, but we were
scared as heck in terms of what was going on
in the world. There was a real threat off in
(02:11):
the Soviet Union, and there was a real sense in
America that we could go to nuclear war and kids
would very shortly be taught on how to duck and
cover under their desks. That was the response if there
was a nuclear attack and the time was ripe for
somebody to come along. And John McCarthy brilliantly understood that fear,
(02:32):
and like any good opportunist or any good demagogue, knew
how to play for it, played to it, and he
played to it not with a realistic and sensible and
boring response He played to it with dynamism. He played
to it with dynamite. He played to it by saying
(02:52):
things that weren't true, but that he knew his listeners
would want to hear. And he understood that just saying
that there were maybe traders out there, Um, if you
did it in general terms, wasn't going to mean anything.
What you had to do was he had to name
the traders, and you had to count the traders. And
he knew how to, in a wild West kind of way,
(03:16):
go in and really shake things up. You know. He
stoked general paranoia, right, And of course, as the saying goes,
just because your paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies.
So we did have enemies, and people were fearful about that,
which does tend to ignite more paranoia because there's always
(03:39):
a kernel of seeds of truth there. And the question,
you know, so paranoid is a term that went along
with Joe McCarthy for for many years, uh following his
death even and the question is really whether we don't
see a lot of evidence of paranoia before this time, right,
(04:02):
we don't see him walking around supposing enemies all over
the place and being paranoid, which is interesting because when
someone has let's say, paranoid personality disorder, you would expect
to see it much earlier than this in their life. Uh,
It's it's true that a traumatic event can happen that
can change someone's trajectory and make them more paranoid. And
(04:24):
it's also true, and I think this does become a
question that substance use and abuse can also heighten a
person's paranoia. And so we do have to wonder whether
ultimately that comes to bear in terms of the degree
of paranoia that he seems to exhibit. But it does
seem at this juncture that it's more likely that, as
(04:44):
you said, he sees an opportunity, and he sees that
the general paranoia that can be ignited and inflamed can
be an avenue for him playing the role of rescuer
protector and therefore holding the power holding being the gatekeeper
and UM, and that's just that is very interesting. Whether
(05:07):
that ultimately later dovetails with his increasing drinking and as
we'll get to later, the use of other substances that
may have heightened his thoughts around this UM is also
something worth positing. But let's move as you said to UM, Really,
his launch into McCarthy is m like his launch into
(05:31):
this whole prosecutorial role. Yes, so I want to just
revisit paranoia for one second and we can come back
to this later. UM. I would say that while Um
he was often called a paranoid, especially in the early days,
UM he was anything, but he was playing to other
people's paranoia. But he was seeing things clearly, and he
(05:54):
knew that he didn't believe in what he was saying.
I'd love to take your listeners to a moment where
I think McCarthy is m was born, and that moment
was in February of nineteen fifty. There is a tradition
in Republican circles in America that the one night that
is best to raise money is when you are honoring
(06:14):
the birthday of the patron saint to the Republican Party,
Abe Lincoln, And they're famously called Lincoln Day dinners. And
if you're a prominent U. S. Senator, you get invited
to places like New York and Boston and San Francisco
and Chicago. If you're Joe McCarthy, the consummate backbencher who
looks like he's on his way to defeat. After one term,
(06:36):
you get invited to Wheeling, West Virginia, which is where
he gave the speech. That night, he shows up with
a briefcase with two speeches. One of them is a
snoozer of a speech on national housing policy that he
actually knew something about, and had he picked that speech
that night to deliver you and I seventy years later,
(06:56):
wouldn't be paying attention to Joe McCarthy. But instead he
grabbed the other speech in his briefcase, and that is
a speech on a subject that he knows arguably less
about than any other member of the U. S. Senate
in that year of nineteen fifty, and that's a speech
on the communist threat not in the Soviet Union, but
behind every pillar in the U. S. State Department. So
(07:19):
he grabs a sheaf of papers and he waves it
around like this in the air, saying, I have in
my hand the list of two hundred and five subversives
in the State Department, and I have the actual names,
and I know the jobs they have, and I'm going
to call on the government to route these people out.
(07:42):
And it was a passionate speech, and it was a
brilliant speech, and it was, as his fellow senators would
later conclude, a fraud in a hoax because a he
had I don't know what he had in his hand.
His friends have speculated that it could have been that
day's racing sheet. But what it was it wasn't a
list of two hundred and five subversives in the government.
(08:05):
What it probably was was a list, a recycled list,
based on the things that I saw in his archives,
a recycled list of the House on American Activities and
other early first generation Red hunters in America. Many of
the people who we actually had names of were people
(08:27):
who no longer worked for the State Department, or who
had had a sister or a brother in law, or
their own association with left wing activities twenty years before.
They were not Flaming spies. Most of the twenty four
Carrot spies had been rooted out long before Joe McCarthy
(08:47):
joined the hunt, most of the ones. When we got
to see the Russian archives, most of the spies who
were still there, Joe McCarthy wouldn't have recognized if he
had tripped over them in the dark on the way
to his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. But what happened
two days after his speech was he was on page
one of every newspaper in America. He had the Truman
(09:09):
administration on the defensive, and he never turned back. That
was the moment where he realized this was the issue
that was going to bring him the limelight. And if
there was a moment where McCarthy ism was given birth,
it was in front of that audience of mine operators
and whoever else was there that night who didn't recognize
(09:30):
what was going on and didn't recognize for sure that
a crusade like we had not seen in a long
time in America was being born. You mentioned, who knows
what those papers were in his hand, Maybe they were
race sheets. I should mention that actually Joe McCarthy was
a gambler. He he liked to bet, He bet in
(09:52):
all kinds of ways, and and that's just important to
keep in mind. Well clearly that that night he bet
on himself and uh and one and the thrill of
the wind, whether we're talking about horse races or his
individual political races or you know, political moments, the reward
(10:12):
of that was addictive. I'm gonna I'm gonna say addictive
for Joe McCarthy. He had Um. You know, some people
from a neuro lot and from a neurological point of view,
are more susceptible to addiction than others. There is something
about their dopamine, the neurotransmitter dopamine of reward, that reward
(10:35):
system that is primed to take off and super reward.
Whether it's a gambling win, whether it's with substance use
and addiction to alcohol or drugs, or whether even it's
something like a political win. But the thing that gives
you that dopamine high is just irresistible. And that seemed
(10:56):
to be a really important feature that we see in
many different ways, the ways in which he was I'll
almost say a slave to his dopamine system, um, and
how that drove a lot of behaviors for him. But
upon this win this night, as you said, there was
no turning back. And it's interesting because from a concrete
point of view, you know, is there any evidence that
(11:19):
he wanted to be president, that he wanted to and
of the words move into into that position of power
or what was the end goal? So there was no
end goal, and that to me is one of the
fascinating things and it is reminiscent of what we see
maybe going on today. That the goal was to get
power and hold on to power. It was not what
you would do with it, whether he ever wanted to
be president. Every time he would deny it to one person,
(11:41):
he tells somebody else he did. I saw a wonderful
check that had never been cashed to the McCarthy for
President committee in his um personal papers. But I want
to just say one more thing about the addiction. You
talked about it compellingly from a mental health point of view.
I want to say that in later years, when McCarthy
went after not just communists, but he went after gays
(12:06):
and lesbians in government, he said that the reason he
was doing that was because they're being closeted where their
sexual orientation made them vulnerable to blackmail by Soviet operatives.
I think Joe McCarthy's addictions made him vulnerable. His gambling
(12:26):
addiction is what he was doing with his money, his
alcohol consumption, all of those are things that made him
more vulnerable than all the people he was targeting for
their alleged vulnerabilities. And it is one more way where
we see hypocrisy defining what he did. But that's another
element I think of opportunism, well, hypocrisy, but what I
(12:49):
would call projection, right, these things within himself. Um, I mean,
he was the one being the bad guy, He was
the one lying, He was the one destroying other people's lives,
and he projected all of this out and including as
you said, the addictions and the self destructive and and
(13:11):
stigmatized behaviors that he was committing. All of this was
projected out. It's I'm not the problem. Other people are
the problem, right. Other people are the spies, the bad guys,
the self destructive guys, the stigmatized guys, and and that
was a huge part of his m O. I guess
(13:31):
I'll say that he that he needed to project all
these things outward and he but at the same time, sadly,
for many other people in this country. Again, his moral
compass didn't seem to make him sympathetic at all or
empathetic at all in terms of destroying other people's lives.
He was sympathetic and empathetic only when he was going
(13:52):
out for the drink after he had destroyed them during
the day, and when he was taking him out and
being their buddy afterwards. He was a bit empathetic. But
in terms of the randomness of this whole um launch
of McCarthy is um, I want to just it is
partly fatuous, but I also think it partly suggests how
random the whole thing was. One of the many ways
(14:12):
his numbers that first week kept changing between especially two
numbers two communists or fifty seven, and the fifty seven,
it was suggested, could have come he was a big
Hamburger eater, and it suggested that he might have gone
in and used Hines fifty seven sauce and that number
stuck in his mind. And that wouldn't surprise me because
(14:34):
the numbers didn't mean much of anything, and it could
have come from anywhere. Let's take a quick break here.
We'll be back in a moment, bed bed bedding. It
(14:56):
is important for people to understand it was not unusual
will for him to have a multi drink lunch, um
to show up on the floor after lunch appearing drunk,
to show up the next day in the Senate appearing hungover,
and um somewhere in this time period became this really
(15:19):
unfathomable story that it seemed he was probably at some
point started to use opiates. It may have started because
he he was prescribed them for pain. He had a
lot of accidents, he broke a bone or or something
like that. Um it may have started because he had
terrible hangovers the next day and was looking for some relief.
(15:39):
But UM, the story of the secrecy of his addiction,
the discovery by the head of the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics and his the the Federal Bureau of Narcotics being
convinced that they basically had to maintain his habit UH
(16:00):
to somehow protect the world or protect his ongoing crusade
against communism, provided him ongoing morphine via a Washington, d c.
Pharmacy and the impact of that secret because you have
to understand that if you think drug use and alcohol
(16:22):
use or substance abuse is stigmatized today, which it is
a deeply, deeply stigmatized and not understood really as an illness,
the degree to which it was stigmatized in the nineteen
fifties is UH today pales in comparison. So I want
to push back a little bit. So what you said
about the morphine addiction, the opioid addiction UM was reported
(16:45):
in the newspapers, and it was in an unnamed way
by the guy who ran the drug agency, and Slinger
was his name. UM. He indicated that there was an
unnamed senior politician who this happened to, when everybody presumed
and it may have been that he was referring to McCarthy.
The pushback on that as I want to be fair
(17:05):
to him. There's enough that we know about what he
did that that would have shown up, I think given
the way his alcohol addiction did in his exhaustive records,
thousands of pages of records UM from Bethesda Naval Hospital.
And I didn't trust who am I a an old
health reporter to sit down and try to make sense
(17:27):
of that and whether there was really any sign of
addiction there. So I sat down with three doctors, one
of whom had just stepped down as dean of Harvard Medical,
A second was the editor in chief emeritus of New
England Journal, and the third was an expert on a
lot of the areas that McCarthy had suffered various medical woes.
And we actually there were four doctors and we sat
down and looked through every one of those pages, and
(17:49):
there was no evidence in his medical records. That doesn't
mean that he wasn't addicted, but it was no evidence
of that addiction. There was a jolting and upsetting set
of evidence of his alcohol addiction, and it was there
(18:11):
at an early stage from the moment that he was
condemned by his fellow senators. That alcohol consumption was quantified
in the records. And the only surprise to me is
that he lived as long as he did drinking that
much in the later years. But one of the interesting
things we now have access to all of the nine
(18:33):
thousand pages of transcripts of McCarthy's closed door hearings, two
thirds of his hearings were behind closed doors. He thought
that they would never become public, and they showed Joe
McCarthy unhinged when he thought nobody was watching. And one
of the many interesting things to me in those hearings,
it wasn't just how he abused the rights of witnesses
(18:54):
and how somebody who appeared before him in a private
closed door session that was used as a staging ground
to see whether they wanted to bring him before the
public and if they were too good a witness, meaning
if they fought back effectively. They never showed up in
the public hearings. It was only the ones that he
knew that he could get the better of. But another thing,
(19:15):
and it may be my looking for it, but I
don't think so. His demeanor changed from the morning sessions,
where I think he was sober, to the afternoon sessions,
where his fuse became shorter. He gave longer diet tribes
of speeches, and I think it was for two reasons.
I think one, his standard lunch was a burger, a
(19:39):
raw onion, and whiskey, and I think he had had
enough whiskey at lunch that he lost his temper more
quickly in the afternoon. But the other thing that I'm
intrigued about from his medical records is he had hemorrhoids.
And it may just have been if you sit for
two hours, the hemorrhoids are controllable. You start looking nasty
after four or five, have a six hours Okay, So
(20:02):
that's interesting. Well, certainly chronic pain of any sort could
definitely shorten your fuse, no question about it. And we
have to wonder why he went from really being I
guess we'd have to argue quite successful in his pursuits right,
in his effect and in his acruement of power in
(20:24):
terms of inflicting McCarthy ism on the on the nation
to to ultimately creating his own downfall by going for
the military, for going going at the army. And that
seems like such a clear, uh self destructive maneuver, I guess,
(20:44):
I'll say, or a very very poor decision that we
have to wonder what what was instrumental in that decision
for him that ultimately brought his downfall. So I think
what happened to Joe McCarthy is he began his crisis
sight of McCarthy is um with that accidental delivery of
a speech that he never knew was going to take
(21:06):
off in that way. And he knew in those early
days when he was raising those charges that he was
being an opportunist and that he didn't have to believe
in the things. I think over time, something strange happened
that he started to believe his own rhetoric in early
nineteen fifty four. By the time he took on the military,
(21:28):
he had failed to see that he was overstepping that
you could bully people in the State Department, you could
get away with it at the Voice of America, you
could get away with it in the government printing office
because nobody particularly knew who those people were or cared
much about them. But there was an institution in America
that was too big to bully. That was the U. S. Army.
(21:49):
That was also the moment when he did that, that
not just the army eventually developed a backbone and taking
him on, but our commander in chief, the one person
in America more popular than Joe McCarthy, This former war
hero Dwight Eisenhower, finally understood that the army was something
(22:10):
he wasn't going to let McCarthy get away with bullying.
He understood that McCarthy was overstepping, and Joe McCarthy went
one step further. Had he not done that, he could
have gone on for years. But I also think what happened.
We look at his poll numbers and when he took
on the Army, the U. S. Senate, his old sub
(22:32):
committee ended up running what was the most famous set
of hearings ever run. They were called the Army McCarthy Hearings.
At the start of those hearings, Joe McCarthy was at
a full fifty percent popularity. The gallop Poles said one
in every two Americans thought he was doing a great job.
By the end of those hearings in the summer of
nineteen fifty four, his numbers had gone from fifty down
(22:56):
to thirty. And anybody who's old enough to member those
hearings remembers one magical moment where a very smart, Harvard
trained lawyer from Boston named Joe Welch stood up and
said when McCarthy went after Welch's young associate and said
that he had been affiliated with a left wing legal group,
(23:17):
Joe Welch famously said, Senator, have you no decency? Well,
the truth is that was not the magical moment, and
the truth is Joe Welch had been waiting during the
entire hearings. He was a performer as well as a lawyer.
He had concocted that line and he was waiting for
a magical moment to deliver it. He picked a great moment.
(23:37):
But the moment only worked because I think Americans had
been watching this guy, who they thought was their hero,
look more like the schoolyard bully on public television, and
they wanted to ask, Senator, have you no decency? And
so that line crystallized the question America had on its mind.
(23:58):
It showed the power of television to take a guy
who was a schoolyard bully and make him look that
way to the American public. And my book begins with
the line, this is a book about America's love affair
with bullies. But I also think that American knows when
a bully is really going too far and it will
(24:22):
part company. So I wrote a book in part about
one of the darkest chapters in American history. But I
think there is ultimately a very uplifting message of this
book and the book. The message is in American history
with our uniquely American strain of demagogues, from Huey Long
(24:45):
and the Jew baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coglin to
Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. The lesson is that give
a demagogue enough rope and they will hang themselves. And
is part of the hanging that the overreach for power,
the displaying who you really are inside, and people finally
(25:08):
being able to grasp that. What what is the lesson
that we can we can learn today about ultimately? You know,
is it the doer or the dewey that ultimately catches
on to the demagoguery. Great question, It's both. I believe
two things about the American people. I believe we are
more naive and susceptible to bullying into demagoguery than we
(25:33):
think about ourselves, because we've shown it repeatedly, you know,
George Wallace, the lots of people who we've bought into.
But I think in the end it is partly demagogues
doing themselves in and it's partly America coming to its senses.
And I believe and I pray that throughout every phase
(25:55):
of history, including today, that in the Americans recognize bullies.
And I think that we saw the first effective pushback
against some of the bullying that Donald Trump does come
from the US military. It came from when he did
(26:18):
over the last month things staging um, the photo opportunity
outside the White House, across the street from the park
and clearing people so we had a path to get there. UM.
The commanders in chief of the various arms services, I'm sorry,
the heads of the various armed services, UM, Defense secretaries, UM,
(26:41):
the heads of joint chiefs of staff passed in present.
When the military is bullied, they stand up and say
that institution you can't touch. And I think that I
think Donald Trump is a very smart politician, and he
probably learned a lesson there. But I also think that
he has almost to the letter, followed the Joe McCarthy
(27:03):
playbook in the last three and a half years. And
it is not a playbook that I'm as an author
writing about Joe McCarthy, and I say, jeez, he's using
that playbook because I want to sell books. Um, nobody
minds selling books. But it's also a playbook that had
a flesh and blood through line in the name of
a smart, arrogant lawyer named Roy Cone, who was Joe
(27:27):
McCarthy's protege and Donald Trump's tutor, and he showed Trump
all the things that a politician can learn from a
guy like Joe McCarthy. And Trump was a very able student.
Let's take a quick break here. We'll be back in
a moment. Be beddy, beddy, beddy. It certainly was Joe
(27:57):
McCarthy's end, so to speak. Senate did go on to
censure him. Um, he did lose his power. He became
sort of a nonentity at that point. He did marry.
He married actually this she was his assistant essentially, and
uh and his teammate and very involved in supporting his work, um,
(28:22):
supporting his ideology, and as you point out, kept his
letters and all the records and everything was part of
keeping those private following his death to protect I suspect
his reputation. She was highly invested, but it wasn't. It
(28:42):
was only I guess a couple of years after the
incident that you described where he is, and then he
has censured that he he becomes increasingly ill, he's hospitalized
more often. It seems like a little of this and
a little of that. No one's ever clear on a
exactly what it is, but um, he is all. He
(29:03):
dies in at the age of forty eight, really quite young.
But um, the doctors say it's hepatitis, a non infectious
hepatitis of undetermined ideology. And that's fascinating because of course
it seems very clear from all the medical records that
it is alcoholic hepatitis. And it's fascinating that even at
(29:29):
that time, given the stigma, there's this effort to hide
what he dies from. So appatitis was part of what
was induced by his alcoholism, but that's not the part
of the alcoholism that killed him, and the doctors had
to have been it was only Um. It wasn't that
long ago. It was the nineteen fifties, and they understood
(29:50):
alcoholism and the effects, and they understood what was happening
to him. And I think there were two reasons that
they told a fib about what he died of. That
the coroner listed acute hepatitis rather than alcoholism is the
cause of death, and that the press repeated that, and
that that's what's gone down in history. And I think
one reason was because they were trying to protect Um,
(30:14):
the family, But I think that UM and alcoholism they
thought as being an embarrassment. I think the other reason
was what you said that Um, it was the ultimate
stigma then and maybe now, to die of an addiction,
to die of something that it looks like people could
turn and say, geez, he did that to himself, rather
(30:35):
than he had a real disease, and alcoholism was a
legitimate disease as we know today. But I'm not sure
that if a politician died of what Joe McCarthy did
today that would be any more candid. And it, to
me was one of the many tragedies of his life
that this guy who, in Bobby Kennedy's words, had been
(30:58):
taken at a toboggan to the top the hill, was
going blind down the hill, and he was so excited
by the ride that the fact he was going to
crash and hurt himself at the bottom, I think never
occurred to him. From the day that he was censured
by the Senate, his political life was over, and I
would argue that his life generally was over. The only
(31:18):
good things he had in his life really from that
time on were an incredibly smart and loyal wife, Jane,
and an infant daughter that they adopted at the very end.
And it was too late, and it was too late
to pull him out of what I think may have
been a depression. Um. I think if he had any condition,
(31:39):
any diagnosable condition, and I'm no psychiatrists, um it may
have been a bipolar disease or what they call then
manic depression, because he had such Mannock highs and he
had such extraordinary lows, and it looked a bit classic
like that, But there were very few highs after his
(31:59):
censure by this in it at the end of nineteen
four and it was really sad what happened to him,
and we had it documented in a way that I'm
not sure, anybody, even public figures like McCarthy, had the
last two days of his life documented. There was a
medical orderly sitting with him, taking down every rant and
(32:20):
rave that McCarthy uttered, taking down every word. His nurse
or doctor said, so when we come along all this
time later, And there were all these conspiracy theories that
Joe McCarthy was murdered, that he died of some fantastic cause. Well,
unless that orderly was lying about everything that happened in
those last two days, he didn't die of any conspiracy.
(32:43):
He died of something hugely tragic, which was the d
T S and alcohol poisoning and a fever that spiked too.
I think it was a hundred and seven. And we
know that you bring up bipolar disorder, and of course
all these things were saying, you know, it's impossible, even
though I am a psychiatrist at a psychoanalyst, for me
(33:03):
to diagnose someone I've never met and based only on
retrospective information. But one would expect that if you did
have bipolar disorder, first of all, the hypomania romania might
put you in a position to be exactly the kind
of expansive thinker and grandiose character and highly creative and
(33:27):
verbal verbally able person that Joe McCarthy by all accounts appeared.
But we don't have documented periods of inability to function
at least until the very end there, you know, after
he was censured, but earlier in his life. There there
are no reported periods of a deep depression such that
(33:49):
one's functionality is impaired and one basically can't get out
of bed and you know, really performed that he seems
to be much more on the side of driven uh
and and and doing that being said, um, there there
are people who have bipolar disorder who have very little
in the way of depression, much more in the in
(34:11):
the vein of hypomania and mania. Um. But I would
have to tell you that if you saw someone like
this today in your office, it would be impossible to
really make an accurate diagnosis until you had treated their
substance abuse, because unfortunately, the substance abuse can make people
appear all of those hypomanic things you know, grandiose, aid
(34:33):
able and um and also depressed, because the reality is
alcohol is a depressant and it actually makes many people
feel both disinhibited in terms of their verbal capacities and
so on, but also feel at times in terms of
their mood, very depressed or fluctuating in mood. And so
(34:53):
it's it's very hard to separate those things. And yet
there's tremendous what we call comorbidity. Right, people who experience
one are very likely to experience the other. If you
are bipolar, you're probably more likely to unfortunately suffer from
substance addiction, UM or any other mood disorder or I
guess we could also argue in the case of Joe McCarthy,
(35:16):
you know how much of this was a potential personality
disorder in other words, that characterologically all along there were
patterns of behavior that were that worked for him in
certain ways but really didn't in others, and particularly anti
social characteristics. A man who enjoyed breaking the rules, I mean,
(35:39):
he liked taking risks, he liked breaking the rules. He
seemed to be devoid of empathy for others, truly if
they making them suffer was not something that pained him.
UM and these sort of You know, if he didn't
happen to have gone into government where he could be
spared the punishments. He is somebody who if he'd gone
(36:01):
into different directions, might have found himself really on the
wrong side of the law and often punished. The only
place I would take exception to what you said is
he did find himself from the wrong side of the law,
but he was protected because he was in the Senate,
and he did. I think that he liabeled lots of people.
He did all kinds of things. There was a hint
(36:24):
in the medical records from his time in the military
that when he went into the medical facilities in the
South Pacific, that doctors wrote different things. And I don't
know whether they were being coy in not being more explicit,
or they didn't know or what it was, but they
(36:44):
suggested maybe he's um suffering from some sort of serious
depression or fatigue, or maybe he's just lazy and doesn't
want to go back out. But there was a hint
that something was going on. But I think that probably
if there was anything they would have kept out of
the medical records, it was um a stigmatized yes depression
(37:08):
or any mental illness. And I wish that I could
have interviewed his doctors from back in the nineteen fifties,
because I think they knew more than they were letting on.
They were extraordinarily explicit about everything, um in terms of
his physical symptoms and the just hinting at things in
terms of mental issues. I think some of the clear
(37:30):
sense I had of what motivated him was an unpublished
memoir that his wife Jean wrote, called The Joe McCarthy.
I knew she never published it for understandable reasons why
she left it behind in his papers. I think what
happens to people when they leave hundreds or thousands of
boxes of papers is nobody has the energy to go
(37:53):
through and see what's there and what's not, and they
throw it all there and say we're putting it into
an archives and nobody's going to see it for a
very long time. And I think some of the greatest
insights into who Joe McCarthy was were not his insights,
because I don't think he was the kind of guy
who would ever sit down and offer any really candid
sense of himself. But she just in observing who he was,
(38:14):
even though she adored him. Um, she was smarter than
he was, as smart as I think he was. Um,
she was his biggest booster. She was a true, true
believer in the cause of McCarthy ism um, which they
would have defined as patriotism and all Americanism. Joe McCarthy
never objected to the term McCarthy ism, He just offered
(38:37):
his own definition for it. But in the end, um,
we are grateful to them because they left behind such
a record of who he was and what he did
and why he mattered and he mattered. There was a
reason my book had a one word title of demagogue,
and that is because while this is a biography of
(38:57):
Joe McCarthy, it is also a biography of this strain
of bullying that didn't end with him and didn't begin
with him, But we can use his life as a
way of understanding and battling back against it. And I
would add to that, there's a concept in my field
called folliado, the delusion of two, and sometimes we see
(39:20):
that literally in individuals. Two people come together and they're
in this delusional world that no one else can understand
because it's not real, it's psychotic, and but they both
believe it and they share this delusion. In Joe McCarthy's time,
he created this belief system right between himself and the
public at large, and they both had to buy into
(39:43):
it for him to continue the delusion, if you will,
or the belief system that he had going his own
McCarthy ism. When one person breaks out of that, it
ends the folia due essentially, And so can we learn
from that historically that that can occur, that that a
(40:04):
that a person can propagate a belief system that a
whole community can buy into, even if it's not accurate,
even if it's not correct. And I hope that we
all can learn that somebody who can gain that kind
of charismatic power of a cult leader of sorts uh,
(40:25):
can can propagate some really delusional thoughts that we can
all buy into. So I love that idea that they
propagate the thoughts, but that becomes scarier still when there
are two of them doing it and they're reinforcing one another.
And there was a very smart physicist from Harvard named
Ramsey who McCarthy invited to his house. Ramsey had been
(40:50):
on meet the Press, I think it was, and it
had been trying to take on um some of the
things that McCarthy had said in one of his hearings
and was being try by the press, and McCarthy felt
badly enough for him that he and his wife invited
Ramsey to come to a dinner party that night at
his house. And Ramsey was a smart guy who would
go on to win a Nobel Prize in physics. And
(41:11):
Ramsey said, at the end of that night, Joe McCarthy
alone didn't scare me. He was not dangerous. But when
you added Jean McCarthy, this incredibly smart, incredibly reinforcing person,
sort of taking all of his worst instincts and feeding
it back, that really scared me. And that could have
become a dictatorship. And I would suggest that there was
another duo in the McCarthy era that did the same
(41:36):
thing before Jean, or during the time the gene was
there doing it at home, there was a guy, Roy Cone,
who we talked about, who was doing it at work.
And Roy Kone was exceedingly smart, exceedingly arrogant, a moral
and he also encouraged all the worst instincts in Joe McCarthy.
And I want to just say one last thing about that,
(41:57):
which is, if roy Cone hadn't gotten the job as
chief council, which really meant chief of staff, the second
in line for that job was a guy named Bobby Kennedy.
And what would Joe McCarthy have been like? And we
can only imagine if it had been Bobby Kennedy there
instead of Roy Cohne helping set the path on where
(42:17):
Joe McCarthy was going. Well, sadly we will we will
never know, but it is important for us to think
about today. Who are the duos? Who do we give
our power to? Right? Who do we give over to
and and thereby join their their system, join their belief system. Well,
(42:43):
that wraps things up for this episode. Thanks for joining
me today. If you're interested in more information about Joe McCarthy,
check out Larry Tis book Demagogue, or for more on
the concepts of personology, you can also check out my
book The Power of Different The Link between Disorder and
Genie Us. Also make sure to follow me on Twitter
(43:03):
at doctor Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy m D Until
next time. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio.
The executive producers are Doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Clang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The Associate producer is
Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For
(43:25):
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
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