In February, 1950, Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, brandishing what he claimed was a list, gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he declared that there were over two-hundred communists working in the United states State Department.
McCarthy would repeat this canard over the next few years changing the number of subversives to whatever captured his imagination.
He held numerous U.S. Senate hearings while he was chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations during which he summoned targets of his suspicions to be grilled before the public about their suspected disloyalty.
He was a complete and total narcissist who was drawn to the publicity and media attention like a moth to a flame.
In 1953 he began an inquiry into suspected communists in the United States Army and singled out Irving Peress. Peress, a New York dentist, had been drafted into the Army in 1952 and promoted to Major the following year under the Doctor Draft law, which McCarthy had voted for. When questioned about his membership in the left-wing American labor Party, Peress invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and McCarthy demanded he be court-martialed.
Instead of court-martialing the dentist, his commanding officer, General Ralph Zwicker, granted him an honorable discharge. McCarthy told Zwicker that he was “not fit to wear his uniform.”
The following year, the Army charged that McCarthy had sought to pressure it into giving favorable treatment to one of his former aides.
Thus began the Army-McCarthy hearings in which the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations began public and televised hearings which transfixed the nation. An estimated twenty-million viewers followed the proceedings over the next thirty-six days.
On the thirtieth day the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, from Boston, demanded McCarthy produce the list of 130 “subversives or communists” that McCarthy had claimed were employed in defense plants. In reply McCarthy suggested that Welch investigate a young lawyer in his Boston law firm, Fred Fisher, who was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, a left-wing bar association.
Incensed, Welch replied, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness….Let us not assassinate this lad, further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”
When Welch finished, the gallery in the hearing room erupted with applause. It was the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s tyranny.
This past week, we saw the departure of the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe.
McCabe was a twenty-two year veteran of the nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency with an unblemished reputation until he drew the attention of Donald Trump.
Trump, who is as narcissistic as McCarthy, has been casting about for reasons to discredit the Mueller probe into his campaign’s collusion with the Russians during the 2016 Presidential campaign.
McCabe, who was appointed Deputy Director by James Comey, became Acting Director following Trump’s firing of Comey.
In his desperation to find a reason to question the impartiality and integrity of the FBI’s investigation into both the Russian meddling and the Clinton e-mail investigation, Trump seized on the fact that McCabe’s wife had been an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for a state legislative office in Virginia during 2015.
Jill McCabe accepted substantial contributions from the Virginia Democratic Party and Governor Terry McAuliffe’s super PAC called Common Good Virginia. (Full disclosure, Terry McAuliffe is my cousin.)
Trump now contends that because McAuliffe is a close friend and supporter of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, the investigations headed by McCabe are politically tainted and that the leadership of the FBI is corrupt.
A close examination of the facts underlying this claim reveal, that like most Trump claims, it has no merit.
At the outset, it should be noted that by the time McCabe became the Associate Director of the FBI in 2016, his wife’s campaign in 2015 had ended in defeat.
While the news outlets have been characterized the contributions coming from a close friend and supporter of the Clintons they have glossed over the fact that the contributions did not come from either Bill or Hillary Clintons PACs but from a PAC that McAuliffe established to try and elect a majority of Democrats to the Virginia Legislature. Hence, the name Common Good Virginia PAC.
Also under-reported is the fact that McCabe had the facts of his wife’s candidacy and the contributions vetted by the FBI, which saw no impropriety in the situation.
None of this matters to Trump or his supporters in the media on Fox News, Breitbart, Limbaugh and others who have ginned up his base with claims of corruption on the part of McCabe.
The end result of all this is that a good public servant had his career ended when Trump’s newly appointed Director, Christopher Wray asked McCabe to step down to end what he termed a “distraction.”
That Wray bowed to this pressure does not bode well for the independence of the FBI’s future investigation of Russian meddling or other matters that might arise from Trump and his various activities.
Not long ago, when events were not breaking Trump’s way, he lamented the absence of his long departed mentor, Roy Cohn.
Cohn was McCarthy’s chief counsel and right hand man.
He was instrumental in ruining all of the lives that he and McCarthy destroyed during their investigations.
Unlike McCarthy, it is not necessary to ask Trump the question “Have you no decency?”
We know the answer to that question.
It is evident from all that he says and does.