Here come da McCarthyism charges from the Left. Watch out GOP, they're gunna get you.

The entire McCarthy era would never have happened had the spooks in the OSS (CIA) revealed the decoded VENONA cables to the Congress and the country. Their refusal to do so, not even Truman or Eisenhower knew of their existence, is actually the root cause of the entire McCarthy "era."

Any time somebody on the Right gets too close to any truth that is uncomfortable for the Left Democrats, they scream “McCarthyism,” as if this response automatically makes them correct. They then build a further story on the falsehood. When the story once again is proven false they repeat the charge of "McCarthyism and let's move on to something else.” Right now the Democrats are being called on the “Bush lied people died” lie and their response is uniformly and predictably, "McCarthyism, let's move on to the next sin." The MSM, still Left to their core, repeats the Left bugle call to all who will listen.

So what was McCarthyism, this horrible thing that Republicans are doing?

A senator, Joe McCarthy, made some charges on the floor and in committee of the U.S. Senate (thus immune from libel or slander) that certain unnamed people were communists and spies, and that these people were in every nook and cranny of Washington D.C., the newspapers, and Hollywood (The fact that Communists, both spies and party members, were at the NYT, Time Magazine and other places, still pisses off the Left). McCarthy did not name names at first. Later on he did name names, but they were mostly the wrong names. Let’s examine the truth.

1. Communists in Washington D.C.: The 3,000 deciphered cables, now called the VENONA Cables, (link is to fascinating details on the breaking of the code) sent from the Soviet diplomatic missions in the United States via commercial cable to Russia, prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Roosevelt Administration was saturated with actual Russian spies, not just Communists. The deciphered cables reveal hundreds of Americans had formal ties to Soviet intelligence services in the 1930s and 1940s. The Soviet spies included at least six people in the State Department (including Hiss); eight people at Treasury; a White House assistant; several prominent scientists in the Manhattan Project (the atomic bomb development project); at least one officer of the CIA's predecessor, the OSS (No intelligence service had so many moles); a sitting U.S. Senator (Samuel Dickstein) and many journalists. The refusal of the spy agency to release VENONA allowed a major Manhattan project spy, Harvard physicist Theodore Hall, to get away scott free.

As an added little story here, the VENONA Cables also proved that the Austrailian Communist spies leaked all Allied plans in the Pacific to the Russians because they wanted a Russian victory rather than an American one.

The nuts and bolts of the Soviet spy op inside the Manhattan Project were this: the Project had been infiltrated by Russian spies (Rosenbergs, the near genius Brit scientist Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, the Greenglass family, and many more). The spying operation was a shocking success for Stalin. See my post called the Rosenbergs for details.

As a side observation here, the entire McCarthy show would have been rendered moot had the spooks revealed the decoded cables to the Congress and the country. Their refusal to do so, not even Truman or Eisenhower knew of their existence, is actually the root cause of the entire McCarthy era. This is the earliest example of a spy agency making up its own rules to the eventual detriment of our country. The same VENONA cables also confirmed the infamous Cambridge-Oxford spy ring in Britain.

Before McCarthy, Richard Nixon earned the lifetime hatred of the Left when he exposed Alger Hiss, an Ivy League WASP with impeccable connections and the right looks, as a Russian spy. Any doubt was removed forty years later when the Venona Cables were made public. A guy name Whittaker Chambers, (link to a great book) former editor of Time Magazine and a long time Communist spy, blew the whistle and gave Nixon the proof. Another Communist, Elizabeth Bentley backed everything up and cinched the case and a lot of other cases too. The Hiss exposure made Nixon Vice President of the United States, which meant to many aspiring presidents that exposing communist spies was a ticket to the top.

The nuts and bolts of the infiltration of the Roosevelt Administration, confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt by the VENONA decrypts, shows a shocking story. The cables proved that Liberal and Left wing Democratic Party darling, Alger Hiss, was a Russian spy,

To be totally accurate, the complete texts of the VENONA Cables were not made available til the mid 90s, so there was no way of knowing, as in actually knowing, the extent of the Soviet penetration of our country. The ironic part of the VENONA revelations is that they also proved something else that lain unproven: that the Communist Party USA had an underground arm. This was buttressed when the Soviet free Russians opened up their archives. Our liberal Left was astounded(?) that the CPUSA was funded by the Soviet and was working under the direction of the NKVD.

So McCarthy was correct. But he had no proof, because none of this information was available to him at the time. His "fishing expedition" for Communists in governement and media could be attacked by the same Russian spies he was after, and since so many were in the media, the attacks were not only finally successful, but the media continued to build a myth around “innocent liberals smeared by the Evil One.” The Left, composed of the CPUSA members, many of their "front groups", and addled brained liberals--the ones Lenin called "useful idiots."---joined in "getting" McCarthy, mainly because "Old Joe" didn't nail anybody. It is a fact that, with the exception of a real jerk named Owen Lattimore, McCarthy just kept "throwing shit against the wall hoping some of it would stick." He never got his Whittaker Chambers, never got his ticket to the White House.

The "Hollywood Ten", (actual Hollywood Communists charged by CPUSA with writing the "right" scenes in movies) were not called by McCarthy but by the earlier HUAC headed by Republican, J. Parnell Thomas (later convicted of accepting bribes). Hollywood already hated the Republicans before McCarthy came along. There were lots of other Commies in Hollywood who were afraid that their connections to CPUSA and Stalin would be discovered, so once McCarthy was wounded they joined in the attack. McCarthy was successful enough only to get some mostly academic and country club Communists "blacklisted" from Hollywood, and as somebody not so famous once said, "Never pick a fight with an actor or a writer. You can't win and they will get you later." However, in this case it was McCarthy who "got" McCarthy; or more accurately is was the Army-McCarthy hearings that were televised live to twenty million people that “got” him.

When McCarthy insinuated that one Fred Fischer, a young lawyer at Hale & Dorr, harbored communist sympathies. Welch (the lawyer representing the Army) responded with a righteous outburst that hit all the hot buttons: "Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness....Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" When McCarthy tried to strike back, Welch cut him off and demanded the chairman "call the next witness." Pausing just a beat, the hushed gallery erupted in applause. The uncomprehending McCarthy, shot dead on live TV, turned to (Roy) Cohn and stammered, "What happened?"

What happened was that television, whose coverage of McCarthy's news conferences and addresses to the nation had earlier lent him legitimacy and power, had now precipitated his downfall. McCarthy, like Nixon, was not a good TV “face.” Nor was his high pitched tone of voice “nice sounding” to the American people, especially when compared to the incomparably good looking Brooks Brothers coiffed Alger Hiss and the other oh so correct looking Communist spies.

On a personal level McCarthy accused Secretary of the Army under Eisenhower, Bob Stevens, of being a communist sympathizer. Stevens was a close family friend. My grandfather and father knew him for years and there was no way he was a communist or communist sympathizer. While his life was not destroyed, he had difficulty getting back into the textile business unscathed even though he was a major stock holder in his family company J. P.Stevens & Co.

So we are to suppose that the charge of "McCarthyism" means accusing somebody of something without proof even if that somebody is guilty as hell. It can also mean that when you dip a rake into a pile of maggots don't be surprised that the festering corpse underneath has more friends than you thought.