 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this virtual book talk with Larry Tai, author of Demagogue, The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, December 10th, at 7 p.m., we'll welcome award-winning historian Jonathan Alter to tell us about his new book, His Very Best, Jimmy Carter, A Life. Joining him in conversation will be Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss. And on Tuesday, December 15th, at 6.30 p.m., a special Bill of Rights Day program will look at the Bill of Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate. The National Archives and its partner, iCivics, will present a panel discussion examining the application of the Bill of Rights in schools. I hope you can join us for these two programs later this month. For his new book on Senator to Joe McCarthy, Larry Tai drew upon a host of National Archives records, Senate Committee investigations, FBI records, personal papers, and diaries. Through the support of the National Archives, many of these were made available for the first time. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Steve Donahue says, Tai has researched extensively and consulted more archival material than has been available to any previous McCarthy biographer. The results of this research make Demagogue the fullest account yet of the crusading junior senator from Wisconsin, according to Duncan White, writing in the Wall Street Journal. In Evan Thomas, in a review that appeared in the Boston Globe, added, Tai is a relentless digger and he was able to mine long secret congressional transcripts. The result is an epic expose that may overwhelm readers with its detail, but will leave them shaking their heads over the rise and fall of the greatest demagogue in American history. Joining us for today's conversation with Larry Tai is Donald A. Ritchie, Historian Emeritus of the U.S. Senate. After service in the Marine Corps, he received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland and joined the Senate Historical Office in 1976. While there, he conducted an oral history program, provided research and reference for senators, the media, and the public, and prepared for publication such previously restricted documents as the closed-door hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy. His own books include reporting from Washington, the history of the Washington Press Corps, the Congress, a very short introduction, electing FDR, the New Deal campaign of 1932, and a forthcoming account of the columnist, Leakes, Lies, and Leibel and Drew Pearson's Washington. Larry Tai is a New York Times best-selling author of several books. His last work before Demagogue was a biography of Robert F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy The Making of a Liberal Icon, which explores RFK's extraordinary transformation from Cold War warrior to fiery leftists. In addition to his writing, Tai runs the Boston-Bath Health Coverage Fellowship, which helps the media do a better job reporting on critical issues like public health, mental health, and high-tech medicine. Launched in 2001 and supported by a series of foundations, the Fellowship trains a dozen medical journalists a year from newspapers, radio stations, and television outlets nationwide. From 1986 to 2001, Tai was an award-winning reporter for the Boston Globe, where his primary beat was medicine. He also served as the Globe's environmental reporter, roving national writer, investigative reporter, and sportswriter. Tai is currently writing a book titled The Jazzmen, How Duke Ellington, Satchel Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America. Now let's hear from Don Ritchie and Larry Tai. Thank you for joining us today. Larry Tai, most biographers tend to write about people that they admire. And you've written in the past about people like Satchel Page and Robert Kennedy, who are complex figures, but people I think that you found really positive things about when you were doing your research. Now you've written a book in which you call a man a demagogue and you start off by identifying him as a bully. What was it that drew you to someone like Joe McCarthy? It was very simple. It was the 2016 election, and it was you, Don Ritchie. So a week or two before the 2016 election, I had signed up to write a biography of Barack Obama. The day after the election, I realized two things. One is that we wouldn't know Obama's legacy until well after the era of Trump, and the other was that this pal named Don Ritchie, who had been telling me for years that there were all these new materials out there on Joe McCarthy that brought his story alive, that he was right, and that McCarthy's story, which I thought was one of ancient history, suddenly looked more like a story of today. Well, today we are virtually in the National Archives. We're surrounded by records. Can you tell us a little bit about what those records helped you understand about Joe McCarthy? Sure. I want to divide it into three sets of records that I got to look at that people hadn't seen or seen in depth before. The first, and probably the golden grail, was all of McCarthy's personal and professional papers, which his widow left shortly after Joe died, and which had been sitting there for more than 60 years at Marquette University, McCarthy's alma mater, and nobody had a look at those. And McCarthy's daughter, for whatever reason, decided that I ought to get a look at those. And those showed me sides of Joe McCarthy, many of which made him look even more malevolent than we had thought, if that was possible. But there were others, like about his war record, that showed that counterintuitively Joe McCarthy was actually telling the truth about things like whether he was a heroic tail gunner during World War II. So one set of records was the Marquette ones. A second set of records were all of these closed-door transcripts that you, Don Richie, had curated the release of. They had again been sitting there for half a century under lock and key. And it turns out that two-thirds of the hearings that McCarthy held were behind closed doors, and those showed Joe McCarthy unhinged. They showed him on the one hand with any token respect that he showed in the public hearings for the rights of the accused went out the window when there was nobody there watching him. They also, as you helped me see, showed a different Joe McCarthy in the morning when he was sober than in the afternoon when he had had lunches of a hamburger, a raw onion, and plenty of whiskey to wash it down. And you didn't want to show up before Joe McCarthy in the afternoon. The third set of records, and those were ones that David, who introduced us here today, the National Archivist, had helped me get, were a set of documents that turned up in my driveway one day in a big brown box, and those were all of McCarthy's medical records from Bethesda Naval Hospital. And those showed that Joe McCarthy did not die of acute hepatitis, which is what the coroner and reporters at the time told us. He in fact died of, if anything, acute alcohol poisoning. He was the drunk that we thought he was, and it was a very sad case of alcohol eating away at him. They also showed, they gave a sense of what was going on behind the scenes, where I think a combination of alcohol and maybe a little bit of chemical imbalance helped explain why Joe McCarthy behaved the way they did. And so the last thing I want to say about those records is, with access to those three sets of untapped documents, if I couldn't write a good book, then shame on me. Well, you've specialized in complex individuals who have multiple sides. Can you talk a little bit about the complexity of Senator McCarthy's personality, who tends to get written off by, or even the textbooks, there's not much good that's ever said about the man? Yes, so Joe McCarthy, unlike many demagogues who we know in our world past and present, is the kind of guy that I would love to have been able to go out for a beer with, because I think he actually had an extraordinary charm, and that charm explains why the voters of Wisconsin twice overwhelmingly elected him as their senator, and why by 1954 at the start of the Army McCarthy hearings, George Gallup told us that Joe McCarthy's favorability rating was an extraordinary 50%, which meant he was only trailing, the only public figure in America more popular then, was the war hero president, Dwight Eisenhower. And I think that all the new evidence on McCarthy convinced me that there was this reason beyond his malevolence that he was an incredibly appealing person, and that's a strange word to use about him. And one of the things beyond you, John, that one of the people who drew me to McCarthy in the earliest stage was a woman named Ethel Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy's widow, who at the time of Bobby's death was voted the most popular woman in America. And she said something to me when I was interviewing her about Bobby that stuck in my mind and that I couldn't believe was true, but I found out was true. She said Joe McCarthy might have been a monster to much of America, but to Bobby and me, he was just plain good fun. And the idea of Joe McCarthy as good fun was as unexpected as anything, and yet I could see how he was, depending on what circumstance you encountered him, was incredibly good fun. Yes, it's interesting. It's the same with the oral histories that we did at the Senate that people remembered him in very different ways, and Ruth Watt remembered him as the only senator who ever gave her a Christmas present. McCarthy's name also goes into the history books because of its association with McCarthyism, the whole Red Scare. Did McCarthy create McCarthyism? So McCarthy created McCarthyism but not the Red Scare. There were people, if we were naming it by the people who were the first to get to the issue of the Red Scare and exploit it, and the ones who probably had the biggest impact, we would call it not McCarthyism, we might call it Dioism after Martin dies the head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and he was there for longer than Joe McCarthy, much before Joe McCarthy, and with much greater credibility in trying to unmask Reds. If we named it after somebody who probably affected more people than Joe McCarthy, we might have called it Trumanism because President Truman had his famous loyalty program where every existing federal employee and everybody applying for a federal job was guilty until proven to be loyal, and it was a sort of shocking premise, and I think in many ways it's set to stage for a lot that McCarthy did, but none of them had quite the panache of Joe McCarthy, the incredible ability to tell a big lie and spin it into a bigger lie and spin it into a whopper and to do it all with a smile and a largely straight face. When Joe McCarthy stood up in Wheeling, West Virginia at the birth of McCarthyism and held in his hand a sheaf of papers and said, I have in my hand a list of 205 spies at the U.S. State Department. What we know today, he might have had his wife's grocery list in his hand and he might have had a recycle list of names from Martin dies, but he sure as heck didn't have a list of 205 spies at the State Department, but within two days he was on page one of every newspaper in America and he never turned back. Joe McCarthy's, I think, ultimate goal in life was to make it onto page one and to create a stir, and he had created such a stir that 70 years later we're still talking about him and 70 years later we're comparing every bully in America to the ultimate goal standard, which is Joe McCarthy. Well, first I want to remind our listeners that Larry will be taking questions at the end of this session, so I'll be thinking about what you'd like to ask. But 70 years later another name appears in the newspapers pretty regularly these days and that was McCarthy's protégé Roy Cohen. What's Cohen's link from McCarthyism to the present? So Roy Cohen is the flesh and blood link between Joe McCarthy and the guy who for the next 40 days is the President of the United States and Roy Cohen was a brilliant and arrogant young lawyer from New York who, unlike Joe McCarthy, actually had a track record of going after and indicting and convicting supposed communists in our government and when Joe McCarthy at the beginning of 1953 suddenly was in the majority and took over the chairmanship of the all-powerful permanent subcommittee on investigations, he needed a chief of staff and he looked around and he almost named to that position a young, recently graduated lawyer from the University of Virginia named Bobby Kennedy and had he picked Bobby Kennedy who knows what his future would have looked like but instead he gave Bobby Kennedy a sort of number two position and he brought in Roy Cohen, Bobby Kennedy's ultimate nemesis from New York, Roy Cohen became McCarthy's protégé and he took the lessons that he learned at McCarthy's knee and 50 years later when a young real estate tycoon in New York named Donald Trump was getting started, Fred Trump, Donald's father and Donald realized that he needed a tutor to teach him the cutthroat ways of the New York real estate world and who better than this now aging New York fixer named Roy Cohen to come in and pass on those lessons so I don't have to speculate as I try to sell books that there was a connection between Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump Roy Cohen was that connection and every time for the last four years when Donald Trump has gotten into trouble he has said, I wish I had a Roy Cohen at my side and I think what he's really saying only it would have been un-PC to say this is I wish I had a Joe McCarthy at my side because it's his mentor's mentor whose playbook he's really using Now McCarthy's defenders have pointed to the opening of the Bonona transcripts back in the 1990s and these were the intercepts between Russian agents in the United States in the 1940s that were finally declassified and finally were finally interpreted later on and they've argued that the Bonona transcripts showed that Joe McCarthy had some justification for what he was doing have you reached any conclusions about the impact of the Bonona transcripts? So there was a guy who wrote an entire book that I just donated to my library this morning actually a guy named Stanton Evans who wrote a book called Black Listed by History suggesting that Bonona and other documents showed that Joe McCarthy was right and that the real black listers are the people who have condemned Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism I think Stan Evans was a very decent guy who got it entirely wrong and I think the Bonona papers and the people who know the Bonona papers better than anybody I asked to take a look at McCarthy's names and compare them to Bonona's names and they had already been doing that and the truth was that only a handful of names on McCarthy's list of hundreds of alleged spies showed up in Bonona and most of that handful were ones that other people had already outed so by the time Joe McCarthy came along any 24-carat communist left in our government had already been exposed and somebody told the joke way back that Joe McCarthy could have been dropped into the middle of Red Square on May Day and not recognized a true communist and I think that joker got it more right than Stan Evans did It's interesting you say that because a lot of the old-time journalists that I got to know who had covered McCarthy, that was their favorite story and almost every one of them would say that to me at some time or another when they were talking about McCarthy and that brings up the question of the media and how well did the media explain McCarthy to the public? Did they contribute to his crusade or did they undermine his crusade? So I think the media then is a whole lot like the media has been the last four years now and what that means is for most reporters Joe McCarthy realized the thing in the world that they wanted most of all was to be on page one and Joe McCarthy put them on page one day after day and the fact that on page 24 the day after his page one story appeared there'd be another story saying well it's not that simple and here's what the other side says about this it was Joe McCarthy who ended up on page one telling to parrot his charges more often than they ought to have been to keep their careers alive and thriving but having said that there were journalists who took on Joe McCarthy at great peril to themselves physically and career-wise and the journalist I have in mind is not the one that Hollywood tells us about Hollywood in a wonderful movie called Good Night and Good Luck they told us that the guy who brought down Joe McCarthy was Edward R. Murrow well we have to look no further than Edward R. Murrow's own testimony on this where Murrow admitted that he was late to the game and his damning reports on Joe McCarthy in 1953 and 1954 were three or four years after McCarthy had launched his crusade the guy who wrote 60 scathing columns on McCarthy starting way back in his first McCarthy's first speech launching his crusade in Wheeling West Virginia was a guy who at the time was the best read and best listened to columnist in America a guy that Don Richie knows better than anybody in America a guy named Andrew Drew Pearson and for his troubles Drew Pearson first of all when he encountered McCarthy in the cloakroom of a posh Washington supper club got slapped around and if it hadn't been for a Quaker peacemaker named Richard Nixon stepping between the two of them he might have really gotten pummeled but the physical pummeling that he avoided that night he got not long after in the halls of Congress when McCarthy went after him and McCarthy as again Don Richie will tell us in his wonderful book McCarthy's chief sponsor for his radio show a company called Adam hats withdrew their support for Drew Pearson show because Joe McCarthy threatened a boycott of Adam hats and so Don am I right isn't Drew Pearson the hero that I think he was with Joe McCarthy he devoted an enormous part of his column to that and his column was the column that exposed the fact that David Schein had evaded the draft and that persuaded the selective service to draft Private Schein and that of course led very much to the undoing of McCarthyism do you want to talk a little bit about Cohen and Schein and the coming of the Army McCarthy hearings sure so as outrageous as the Roy Cohn was and Bobby Kennedy had a great metaphor he said that Roy Cohn was the guy who took Joe McCarthy up to the top of a steep mountain in a toboggan and they had an extraordinary ride down only they had no breaks and so it was inevitable that they would crash but they had a blast on their way down and so that's who Roy Cohn was in terms of the things that he did in I think reinforcing every bad instinct in Joe McCarthy's bones well Roy Cohn at least was brilliant and David Schein Roy Cohn's young pal wasn't brilliant he was wealthy he was brought on staff for supposedly a dollar or for no money and he and his pal Roy did everything they could to convince everybody who mattered in the Army to keep David Schein out of the Army they couldn't pal around the world together if David Schein was drafted well he was eventually drafted and all the outrageous things that they did ended up becoming half the story of the Army McCarthy hearings Joe McCarthy's old subcommittee wanted to investigate McCarthy Cohn and Schein's misdeeds and the Army's misdeeds and enabling them and in maybe harboring communists and the senators were so overwhelmed by the charges and counter charges that they ended up holding months of hearings probably the most highly publicized and most well watched by the American public hearings in the history at least pre-watergate of the US Congress and these hearings Joe McCarthy started out the hearings with a 50% Gallup favorability rating by the middle of the hearings Americans were having their doubts and in maybe the most famous words ever uttered by an American lawyer a smart lawyer from Boston stood up at one point when McCarthy had attacked his young associate and said senator have you no sense of decency at long last have you no decency by that moment I think all of America wanted to ask the same question and by the end of the hearings Joe McCarthy's favorability had dropped from 50% to 34% at that moment his fellow senators finally developed the backbone that they had lacked and they censured him Very dramatic story there's one person we haven't really talked about and that's the one person who was more popular than Joe McCarthy and that was Dwight Eisenhower and Eisenhower was known as his hidden hand presidency and there's a lot that was hidden about what he was doing but I wondered if you could assess Eisenhower's relationship to McCarthy and how much credit he should get for Joe McCarthy's undoing Right, so I want to start out by saying well I may play a historian on TV I'm not a historian and you read smart historians at Dwight Eisenhower and they would tell you a very different story than I'm going to tell you they would say that the way he used he exercised behind the scenes his hidden hand in undoing McCarthy was one of Eisenhower's proudest moments and I think that's a lot of hogwash and I think that Dwight Eisenhower and McCarthy's enabler in chief and while Dwight's brother Milton from almost the day Dwight took office was whispering in Dwight's ear saying give up a little of your favorability take on this bully McCarthy Eisenhower said no we've got to let McCarthy do himself in now that might have seemed like a strategic decision for a smart general to make and it would have been fine had lives and careers not been ruined in the interim and in the time from the time McCarthy from the time Eisenhower took office at the start of 1953 to the time the army McCarthy hearings happened in 1954 Eisenhower failed to stand up to McCarthy McCarthy was basically laughing in his face and was taking on Eisenhower and saying something mean about him every chance he got Eisenhower's least proud moment and the last thing I want to say on that and the most shameful thing Eisenhower did was fail to take on Joe McCarthy when McCarthy attacked Eisenhower's one of his best friends and closest associates during World War II the famous heroic general George C. Marshall McCarthy slandered Marshall Eisenhower had in his hand a speech he was going to give defending Marshall and he decided too many votes were at stake in the state of Wisconsin he didn't do it and to his grave I think he regretted not having done that well that brings up McCarthy's targets the victims of McCarthyism who are the people that McCarthy was after and how did you assess them as you were looking at him so I had a chapter in my book called the body count and I think going back and understanding who the victims were that's really important and what I discovered was when I would go back and talk to people who were still alive as the people McCarthy targeted or their children or grandchildren that he ruined more careers and upended more lives and silenced more people who were afraid to be even liberals for fear they would be attacked as communists but to me most compelling of all was the nearly dozen people who took their own lives because of Joe McCarthy and this was not my speculation this was them leaving suicide notes or their family saying that's why they did it and they included Don as you know two US senators a guy named Hunt and a guy even more famous named La Follette and these were two people who had at various points for various reasons stood up to Joe McCarthy and that was such a painful process and McCarthy was so vindictive that they ended up shooting themselves and it was just part of the body count that we can't discount that there were real victims the same way there are today with demagogues lives ruined It's an interesting story but looking at the people who came to testify before the McCarthy committee that many of them are quite willing to talk about the fact that they had been members of the Communist Party in the 1930s but they had left because they had fallen out with the party especially during the Soviet Nazi pact in 1939 that sort of threw all of their ideals up for grabs and yet the problem was that they didn't want to identify other people that they knew in the party often family members or good friends and so this issue of naming names became really a big sticking point in the whole McCarthy investigation and one that he pursued and too much to the detriment of the witnesses before him and that whole lesson and the price that McCarthy extracted in terms of public discourse in America is one that we can see in the state of Georgia today where the most facile charges that the two Republican candidates are leveling against their Democratic opponents are you're a left-wing socialist and even today that scourge of the slander of being called a socialist is for many people sort of the beginning and the end of discussion and it still works and it just it is to me one more legacy 70 years later of Joe McCarthy Well we have some other questions to ask but I do want to remind the audience that we are accepting questions and Larry will be glad to engage with any issues you have on this book I wanted to go back to McCarthy's censure every Democrat except for John Kennedy who was hospitalized at the time and half of the Republican senators voted to censure Joe McCarthy what did that do to him? And so it ruined him he stayed in the Senate until the end of his life he was centered in December 1954 he died early in 1957 but he was ruined and we understand now just the extent of that ruination when we look at his medical records and we see that he was drinking almost the equivalent of a quart of whiskey a day for much of the rest of his life we basically realized that he had been repudiated by his colleagues and only the real true believers stuck with him so it was just horrible I would like to correct in a very small way something that you said though that John Kennedy it was because he was in the hospital in fact he was getting a back operation and that was the perfect fig leaf for why he never told us then or ever how he would have voted on the century of Joe McCarthy and I think the reason John Kennedy never told us was because on the one hand he knew as a Democrat he couldn't say something nice about Joe McCarthy on the other hand he knew that when he ran for US senator in 1952 the one thing that could have killed his campaign was if Joe McCarthy came into the great state of Massachusetts and campaigned for the distinguished senator Henry Cabot Lodge the incumbent that Kennedy was challenging so he had to keep McCarthy out of Massachusetts McCarthy was a Republican it would have been a natural to come in and campaign for Lodge but he would have taken a lot of the Catholic vote that was with Jack Kennedy and could have turned it against him well so what he did was nothing he waited for his father to do something and Papa Joe Kennedy had over the years donated enough money and had to Palm Beach or to High Anasport often enough Joe McCarthy that when Papa Joe Kennedy said to Joe McCarthy would you stay the heck out of Massachusetts McCarthy did that that helped ensure in a year that was an Eisenhower landslide that Jack Kennedy won by a narrow margin of 3% when Eisenhower carried the state for the Republicans by 9% Jack Kennedy for the rest of his life felt obliged to Joe McCarthy so what he did was he pretended that he couldn't vote on McCarthy's censure he couldn't pair his vote with another senator who would have voted the other way and he never felt the need to explain what he would have done and it hurt him in some respects I know Mrs. Roosevelt refused to support him in 1956 when he wanted to be vice president and she said to his face it was because he hadn't been willing to stand up to Joe McCarthy in 1954 we talked to the impact of that censure did that end McCarthyism? so the impact of the censure is that it ended Joe McCarthy as a senator who was effective at doing anything but it didn't end McCarthyism McCarthy was buried in 1957 but in the year 2020 I sadly have to report that McCarthyism in many quarters is alive and well so the man was gone but not the movement it is surprising looking back that very shortly after McCarthy the John Birch society arrived arose and shortly after the John Birch society Barry Goldwater was the nominee of his party and you know a lot of Goldwater had been a very strong supporter of McCarthy so clearly the image that it slammed the door on McCarthyism has to be revised it does have to be revised revised and there was a smart young conservative named Buckley why am I blanking on his William F. Buckley right, William F. Buckley and his brother in law a guy named Brent Bozell wrote a book basically saying that McCarthy had been right and Buckley became one of the fathers of a more modern day conservative movement with the publication that he founded and a whole movement and he to his dying day Buckley defended Joe McCarthy and I think to a lot of conservatives he was the conservative who had had liberal stabbing him in his back not the guy whose movement was shown to be a lie I believe that we've gotten some questions but I see one of them here which was from Tom Nastic which was what was the public perception of the attacks on Marshall at the time and the answer was that Marshall was popular enough he had been an orchestrator of the Allied victory during World War II that while it didn't end McCarthy's crusade I think there were very few people and certainly nobody in the Senate who he was preaching to with Joe McCarthy was preaching to with his very long speech I don't think anybody bought any of that but McCarthy also wasn't doomed by that we see the way if you accustomed people to telling small lies when you tell whoppers they will continue to believe you enough of them will to let you keep telling them you've mentioned several times the US Senate at that stage and McCarthy's colleagues in the Senate I don't think all of them bought what he was saying very few of them were willing to stand up or to speak out against McCarthy can you talk a little bit about that sort of the political situation that Senators were placed in that time sure so I want to just mention two names of Senators and they to me capture what was going on one was a Democrat from Maryland named Millard Tidings and Millard Tidings headed up a subcommittee that took on Joe McCarthy shortly after his famous Wheeling speech when he launched his crusade and Tidings essentially concluded that McCarthy was a fraud and a hoax and I think rightfully concluded that McCarthy went after Tidings that November in Maryland recruited a no-nothing Republican to run against him helped get Texas oil money and other money to underwrite the campaign lent this guy named Butler Joe lent him his bag of dirty tricks and Millard Tidings a Titan of the Senate was taken down to defeat and that sent a shockwave among Democrats essentially saying take on Joe McCarthy at your own risk he'll bring in his bulldozer the first Republican to credibly take him on was the only woman in the U.S. Senate then a woman named Margar Chase Smith from the great state of Maine and Margar Chase Smith and six fellow moderate Republicans launched what they call their declaration of conscience against McCarthy saying that all of his techniques were un-American and while Margar Chase Smith was herself an anti-communist she said Joe McCarthy's gone too far McCarthy in wonderfully poetic and yet slanderous fashion came back and called Smith and her six colleagues Snow White and the six dwarfs and he again went after Margar Chase electorally without any success but it was still the message was being sent whether you think I'm telling the truth or not you damn well better not stand up and call me a liar because I'm going to come and get you and I've got enough public support again reminding us of things in more contemporary days where people are afraid to stand up and say the emperor has no clothes the emperor also of course was popular enough that he was bringing votes to his party and there were a lot of members who just didn't want to cross that and lose the opportunities that McCarthy was providing including a relatively decent senate majority leader named Robert Taft of Ohio who had a narrow not enough margin of Republicans in the senate that he wasn't about to go and create shockwaves in his own party and potentially win this Republican from Wisconsin so even Robert Taft who in private was telling friends Joe McCarthy is an embarrassment publicly was saying if one charge proves wrong let's listen to his next charge does it again remind us of any majority leaders in the senate and at the time we should mention the minority leader of the senate was a particularly wily politician at the time yes at one baines johnson who again said I don't want you my fellow Democrats to take on McCarthy let's wait for the Republicans to do it so there was a lot of kicking the can I'm afraid with McCarthy and a lot of embarrassing silence about Joe McCarthy's crusade I'm curious again since this is a national archives event you talk a little bit more about the extent of the records that are there when you're dealing with McCarthy how voluminous is the trail that you're following so the trail is I think really voluminous and more so now sadly McCarthy's daughter who controlled the records at Marquette recently died and those records are now open therefore to anybody there and those are voluminous the transcripts that you curated was I think we counted 9,000 pages or nearly 9,000 pages that's pretty voluminous the records the archival records of his subcommittee are voluminous there are endless records out there and then there are all the other records about the red scare and about the wider movement that McCarthy was part of so I had probably 250 books and tens of thousands of pages of files and it was just it was amazing I thought that I had had a lot for books on people like Satchel Page and Bobby Kennedy but there was endless stuff out there in Joe McCarthy that's the good news and the bad news for any research now we just had a question about an early episode in McCarthy's career and that had to do with the Malmady massacre a peculiar situation in which he was in a sense defending SS troops during World War II and the question is did that suggest that his politics somehow was sympathetic to the Nazis so I think that's a great question and a more less polite version of the question is was McCarthy an anti-Semite and the answer when I started out doing my research was I think that's going too far and the answer by the end was yes I want to just give a little bit of my evidence the Malmady massacre if people don't remember that was the bloodiest massacre of American soldiers in a very bloody World War II and this was outside a little town in Belgium called Malmady at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge when a bunch of American soldiers overwhelmed by Nazi SS Panzer tanks held up their white flags to surrender the Nazis ignored that they mowed them down they burned them out they basically massacred them after the war we found the perpetrators of the Malmady Massacre and as one of the trials at Nuremberg they were tried they were convicted and they were sentenced to death and just about everybody in the world accepted that but not Joe McCarthy and Joe McCarthy stood up in front of a subcommittee that was created to investigate the convictions he said that they were wrongly convicted that they were tortured which there was no real evidence of and that it was these overly zealous Jewish prosecutors who were largely to blame for what happened to them so that was one incident where certain questions were raised and the question was was he anti-Semitic or was he just wrong and misguided over time Joe McCarthy did one thing after another that led me to conclude that it was more than being misguided he would tell his friends he would refer to Jews as heaps as an equally vicious slur word sheenie he when he was going after alleged communists at places like the U.S. Army disproportionate numbers of them turned out to be Jews and this was raised as an issue in the closed door and other hearings time and time again and Joe McCarthy would always say look I've got Roy Cohn a Jewish lawyer at my side how could I be an anti-Semite but Joe McCarthy at the same time was telling his friends that he hired Roy Cohn because he was being accused of an anti-Semite and he realized if he had a Jewish lawyer at his side that would protect him I think it was the same way many populist movements of the time and of today are only slightly veiled anti-elitist often racist often anti-Semitic and Joe McCarthy was of that ilk at his time and I think things that he said and things that he did made me believe at the end that he was truly anti-Semitic he also came from a state with a very large German population and I wondered was McCarthy at heart an opportunist so he was an opportunist and he knew that this on the one hand he hoped that Germans back in Wisconsin would appreciate what he was doing standing up you know defending the rights of these malmady perpetrators but I think that did a huge disservice to the Germans in Wisconsin they were probably more embarrassed by the horrible things that the Nazis did than many other Americans because they had had to defend it and were attacked for it and I think McCarthy misread his constituents but the question of whether he was an opportunist he was somebody who would do anything and I want to underline the word anything to get ahead and to get himself on page one and he showed that repeatedly he was the definition of both a bully and an opportunist this is a famous story but when he came back after his that speech and wheeling and said to his secretary have we gotten any press on it he said he was almost intoxicated with the news that he was on front pages of newspapers across the country yes and the secretary that you're referring to was the sister of one of the most famous TV journalists in American history Joel Brinkley and finally after McCarthy died years after McCarthy died she admitted to her brother just how specious McCarthy's charges were and how he knew that and did it anyway there are a lot of ironies to the Joe McCarthy story unfortunately people let him get away with it for a very long time and for devastation in the country do you see any warning signs about that in our country today? I see huge warning signs but I'm an incredible optimist and I think throughout our long history of demagogues whether it was Huey Long or George Wallace Joe McCarthy or people today the lesson is that given the time America rediscovers its better nature and given the rope every demagogue in American history has eventually hung themselves well I believe we've come to the end of our program and I want to say that demagogue is a lively book and I hope that everyone's listening to this will take the opportunity to read more about this because the McCarthy story really is a critical story in American history and it's one that hasn't ended yet. So if I get the quick last word my last word is watch out for Don's Drew Pearson biography which will be out in April and it's going to be a terrifically lively book. Thank you very much. Thank you.