My current impression of McCarthy is that he was basically right that there were, indeed, Soviet infiltrators, but he didn’t have any particular insight into finding them and ended up making accusations basically at random. Is that a reasonable one-sentence summary?
No, I wouldn’t say that’s a good summary, and the phenomenon was unfortunately much too complex to be described with a one-liner with any degree of accuracy.
The fundamental problem with such simple summaries is that they implicitly assume an oversimplified historical background to the whole situation: the U.S. pitched against the U.S.S.R. in a state of all-out Cold War hostility, with the entire U.S. government acting in a coherent way as a unified entity in this struggle for global supremacy, and individuals accused of acting as Soviet agents being either conscious and willing traitors working for Moscow or innocent victims of a witch-hunt. One must replace these simplistic preconceptions with a much more nuanced and detailed view before one can even begin to form anything more than a cartoonish picture of the so-called “Second Red Scare” period. (Which was in fact well underway, with the HUAC hearings, the Hollywood blacklist, the Hiss-Chambers affair, etc., years before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
I could write a great deal about this topic, but I think that such a lengthy off-topic diversion would probably be too much.
My current impression of McCarthy is that he was basically right that there were, indeed, Soviet infiltrators, but he didn’t have any particular insight into finding them and ended up making accusations basically at random. Is that a reasonable one-sentence summary?
No, I wouldn’t say that’s a good summary, and the phenomenon was unfortunately much too complex to be described with a one-liner with any degree of accuracy.
The fundamental problem with such simple summaries is that they implicitly assume an oversimplified historical background to the whole situation: the U.S. pitched against the U.S.S.R. in a state of all-out Cold War hostility, with the entire U.S. government acting in a coherent way as a unified entity in this struggle for global supremacy, and individuals accused of acting as Soviet agents being either conscious and willing traitors working for Moscow or innocent victims of a witch-hunt. One must replace these simplistic preconceptions with a much more nuanced and detailed view before one can even begin to form anything more than a cartoonish picture of the so-called “Second Red Scare” period. (Which was in fact well underway, with the HUAC hearings, the Hollywood blacklist, the Hiss-Chambers affair, etc., years before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
I could write a great deal about this topic, but I think that such a lengthy off-topic diversion would probably be too much.
Yeah, I suppose it’s always more complicated than that...