I stumbled across someone who had posted this link:
http://www.newsmax.com/brennan/McCarthy/2007/12/18/id/322450/
Which talks about a novel that allegedly vindicates a lot of the actions McCarthy took, and to the eyes of the public it appeared to be a witch hunt, when it was actually a specifically targeted operation based on information intercepted
Then there's the matter of the source of many of Joe's accusations, as Evans point out, accusations proved by release of the so-called Venona Intercepts of Soviet cable traffic whose code was broken back in the mid-40s and remained top secret until recently.
These intercepted cables proved that there were over 350 Americans spying for the Soviets, and enabled investigators to identify about half of them. Joe McCarthy had access to the information contained in the top secret Venona intercepts, access given him by J. Edgar Hoover and others concerned with the extent of Soviet espionage and penetration, but he could not defend himself against charges of recklessly accusing people of being Soviet agents by revealing the source of his information without alerting the Soviets that some of their most important secrets were known to U.S. Intelligence.
I'd love to hear the thoughts of those who have read this books, and any history experts with knowledge on the McCarthy situation. Thanks
I don't know the book (it sounds bad), but here are some general thoughts on McCarthy and Venona.
The Venona decrypts definitely have substantiated the idea that there were Soviet agents in the United States, even within the US government. It vindicated those who had accused, on the basis of former Communists who had "defected," several government officials of being Communists and lying about it (e.g. Alger Hiss). This much everyone has agreed upon since the 1990s, when the Venona transcripts were released.
McCarthy and HUAC had no access to the Venona intelligence. In fact, not even President Truman had access to it. When McCarthy claimed to have a massive list of Communists in the State Department, he was making that up. When he claimed there was a massive conspiracy of Soviet penetration into various US institutions, he was making that up. (Venona makes clear that while there were non-trivial amounts of espionage, it was not the overwhelming amount that McCarthy et al. claimed.)
So what to make of this? McCarthy was a demagogue, that much is clear. His interests were not in legitimately rooting out espionage nor did he actually aid that effort (in some ways, he complicated it). His goal was to ride a political wave of fear and paranoia into greater amounts of political power. This much is pretty clear. I mean, he accused General George C. Marshall of treason at one point — these weren't exactly careful or focused attacks.
What is unfortunate, and perhaps "the lesson," about McCarthy is that his overheated and intellectually dishonest antics resulted in a trivialization of the actual threats by people who could see that his approach was wrong, but were not given access to actual data (like Venona). So it is true that esp. after McCarthy's fall, the idea of significant threat from Communist spies was trivialized as a right-wing fantasy. That's not quite fair, but McCarthy certainly trafficked in right-wing fantasies, and the more convincing, sober evidence was kept secret until the 1990s.
This is just a brief description; there are many angles to this. But I would disagree that Venona "vindicates" McCarthy in any significant way. That would be somewhat like saying that if Marinus van der Lubbe had turned out to actually light the Reichstag fire (he may have, he may not have), it would vindicate the Nazis' later actions done in the name of said fire. McCarthy's goals and methods were not benign, they were not actually strongly informed by facts, and he likely did more damage to the anti-Communist camp than it aided it.
This specific question is taken up in Daniel P. Moynihan's Secrecy: The American Experience (1998), which is a fairly balanced look at this question (among others) in the light of the Venona releases.