Tye’s excavation of McCarthy’s biography is exhaustive, if workmanlike. The prose is often marred by awkward descriptions (“supersonic senator”), clichés (“central casting,” “behind closed doors”), and needless details (do we really need to know the number of pages in William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell’s McCarthy and His Enemies?). What’s missing is a deeper examination of the anti-Communist movement.
For many historians of McCarthyism, the word itself is a telling misnomer. “It is unfortunate that McCarthyism was named teleologically from its most perfect product, rather than genetically—which would give us Trumanism,” the journalist Garry Wills once wrote, an observation that Tye notes. Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes, a superb history of McCarthyism, proposes a more fitting term: “Hooverism.”
In 1919, J. Edgar Hoover, then a 24-year-old Justice Department official, was appointed by the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, to conduct a war on radicals. The Palmer Raids became the nation’s first Red Scare. Drawing on fear of the Bolshevik Revolution, anger at a wave of political bombings (including the bombing of Palmer’s house), and anti-immigrant sentiment, Hoover rounded up thousands of people and expelled many of them, including Emma Goldman. Hoover’s longevity and bureaucratic power made the Red Scare almost a constant, defined only by periods of greater or lesser intensity. As early as 1938, for example, Hoover began attacking the motives of Spanish Civil War volunteers. In a memo he wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attorney general, Homer Cummings, he proposed that the volunteers were being sent to Spain to learn “the art of military science so that they can be returned to the United States to lead the vanguard of the revolution in this country.”
Hoover was essential to McCarthy, too. He dined frequently with the senator at Harvey’s Restaurant, a Washington power lunch spot of the 1950s. Hoover supplied McCarthy with names of alleged Communists or fellow travelers, former FBI agents were lent to McCarthy as staff, and Hoover squelched rumors that McCarthy was gay. In letters to Hoover, McCarthy would sometimes cross out Edgar and write in “Boss.”