Streaming Now: McCarthy - Power Feeds on Fear

Senator Joseph McCarthy burst onto the national stage in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he’d been sent to give the annual Lincoln Day dinner speech to the local Women’s Republican Club. Four years into an undistinguished senate career, he’d amassed a record of repeated failure and was not expected to win reelection. It was a backwater assignment, indicative of his place at the bottom of the Republican party hierarchy, but his speech that night, in which he claimed to have a list of 205 known communists currently working in the State Department, would change the trajectory of his political career and throw the nation into turmoil for the next four years.

McCarthy - Power Feeds on Fear, streaming now as part of PBS’s American Experience, illustrates McCarthy’s canny exploitation of Cold War anxieties and fears of Soviet espionage, all for his own political gain, regardless of the consequences.

“There are moments in American history when the country is afraid, when there is a threat that is hard to define, and it’s in those periods that demagogues arise,” says Timothy Naftali, Presidential Historian, in the film. “We don’t always show the best of ourselves when we’re afraid. McCarthy tested the system and the institutions that should have stopped him, didn’t for a while.”

McCarthy is portrayed as a political opportunist without any real convictions beyond his own political ambition.

“Joe McCarthy was one figure who came along and turned anti-communism into something bigger and more dangerous than anyone else ever imagined,” says Sam Tanenhaus, Writer, in the film. “He was the demagogue of American anti-communism. He wasn’t the inventor.”

While left unspoken in the film, the parallels to our current political conflicts, and to the political style of Donald Trump, are clear.

He lied boldly and often. “He tells a lie and people go to track this down, and by the time you responded to that, he’s told three others,” says journalist Jelani Cobb. “It’s a sheer exercise in fatigue.”

He was enabled by a complicit, if somewhat reluctant, Republican party. “Republicans realize there’s just too much political capital at stake for them to desert McCarthy,” says historian David Oshinsky. “Public opinion polls show this gigantic upsurge in support of McCarthy’s charges. So the Republicans are saying to themselves, we have a complete loose cannon with virtually no information at the head of our army at this moment. We’re riding along with him because we basically have no alternative.”

The media, recognizing his gift for sensationalism and his broad public appeal, gave him a platform and amplified his message.

“There was a media benefit to McCarthy existing,” says Jelani Cobb. “Editors knew that if you put a quote from Joe McCarthy on a headline above the fold, front page of the newspaper, people were going to pick that newspaper up, that McCarthy was good copy. There is a kind of hyperbolic sensational quality to McCarthy’s rhetoric that was very marketable. It sold papers.”

And finally, there was Roy Cohn, who functioned as McCarthy’s right hand and main attack dog, a role he would reprise years later for Donald Trump.

The difference then was that eventually the Republican party got tired of him, and brought him to heel, ultimately censuring him in the wake of the Army McCarthy Hearings in 1954, after which he was essentially banished from the party. He died not long afterwards of alcohol related causes in 1957.

“Once McCarthy was censured, the press began to ignore him,” says historian David Oshinsky.  “The gravy train was over. The conveyor belt was gone. Nobody cared. He couldn’t get his message out.”

“McCarthy brought out the complicity in American journalists, that we like the troublemaker and the rabble-rouser and the theatrical, spectacular figure who says the thing you’re not supposed to say, who breaks the rules, who disregards the facts,” says Sam Tanenhaus. “That makes for really good copy. And that’s what happened, that’s what kept McCarthy going for a long time until it all fell apart, and then he was just discarded.”

McCarthy - Power Feeds on Fear was written, produced, and directed by Sharon Grimberg. Click here to stream it from PBS.org.