against Herbert Lehman, John Foster Dulles said of his opponent: “I know he is no Communist, but I also know that the Communists are in his corner and that he and not I will get the 500,000 Communist votes that last year went to Henry Wallace in this state.” In Illinois, Everett Dirksen defeated Senator Scott Lucas, promising to clean house on Communists and fellow travelers. The Republicans had found their issue and the Democrats were clearly on the defensive.
“The primitives,” Dean Acheson called them. Truman was blunter: “The animals,” he branded them. They were the Midwestern and Far Western isolationists who were eager to exploit the issue of domestic Communism. With the fall of Chiang they had their red meat. They included: Knowland of California, who would later so exasperate Eisenhower that the President claimed he confounded the age-old question “How stupid can you get?”; Mundt of Indiana, who, after a friend of Hiss’s apparently committed suicide by jumping out a window, answered a reporter’s request for more names of Communists by answering, “We’ll name them as they jump out ofwindows”; Hugh Butler of Nebraska, who told his supporters in 1946, “If the New Deal is still in control of Congress after the election it will owe that control to the Communist Party”; Bill Jenner of Indiana, who called George Marshall a traitor and charged when Truman fired MacArthur that “this country is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by Agents of the Soviet Union”; Bricker of Ohio, voted the worst senator in the same poll; Wherry of Nebraska, famous for such bloopers as referring to Vietnam as “Indigo China”; and Welke of Idaho, who fancied himself a professional-baseball scout and maintained that he had never met a ball player who was a Communist. That such men rallied to McCarthy was not surprising. What was surprising was that perhaps the most elegant and principled Republican in the Senate, Robert Taft, bent during the early months of McCarthyism.
It sometimes seemed during that period that there were two Tafts—one the thoughtful conservative who was uneasy with the coming of America the superpower and its growing obsession with anti-Communism. That Taft had voted against NATO and other programs that were part of the effort to check the Soviets in Europe. In his speeches, he systematically downplayed the Soviet military threat, and he often scolded the administration for inflated rhetoric about the Communist danger, which he said was provocative to the Russians. He feared the dynamic of the Cold War would turn America into the policeman of the world, transforming it from a democracy to an imperial power, a role, he believed, for which we were ill suited.
Then there was the other Taft, who could exploit the fall of China and attack the administration for being soft on Communism. He spoke of sending the Navy to help Chiang and of giving military aid in China as he would not in Europe. Slowly, he came to use the issue of domestic subversion. He referred to people in the State Department who were “liquidating” the Chinese Nationalists, and he said that State “was guided by a left-wing group who have obviously wanted to get rid of Chiang and were willing at least to turn China over to the Communists for that purpose.” He voted against confirmation of George Marshall as secretary of defense.
For men like Taft the use of the Communist issue was a way of gaining some revenge after years in which the Democrats had portrayed Republican domestic policies as cold and heartless. Taft himself had been the target of unusually cruel assaults, which portrayed him as a pawn of the rich.
Two pieces of literature used against Taft were particularlynasty. One was a booklet mocking his life. Supposedly, as a small boy in the Philippines, he had been stung by a jellyfish. “This too,” went the book, “must have made a deep impression on Taft. It may have been the start of his
“The primitives,” Dean Acheson called them. Truman was blunter: “The animals,” he branded them. They were the Midwestern and Far Western isolationists who were eager to exploit the issue of domestic Communism. With the fall of Chiang they had their red meat. They included: Knowland of California, who would later so exasperate Eisenhower that the President claimed he confounded the age-old question “How stupid can you get?”; Mundt of Indiana, who, after a friend of Hiss’s apparently committed suicide by jumping out a window, answered a reporter’s request for more names of Communists by answering, “We’ll name them as they jump out ofwindows”; Hugh Butler of Nebraska, who told his supporters in 1946, “If the New Deal is still in control of Congress after the election it will owe that control to the Communist Party”; Bill Jenner of Indiana, who called George Marshall a traitor and charged when Truman fired MacArthur that “this country is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by Agents of the Soviet Union”; Bricker of Ohio, voted the worst senator in the same poll; Wherry of Nebraska, famous for such bloopers as referring to Vietnam as “Indigo China”; and Welke of Idaho, who fancied himself a professional-baseball scout and maintained that he had never met a ball player who was a Communist. That such men rallied to McCarthy was not surprising. What was surprising was that perhaps the most elegant and principled Republican in the Senate, Robert Taft, bent during the early months of McCarthyism.
It sometimes seemed during that period that there were two Tafts—one the thoughtful conservative who was uneasy with the coming of America the superpower and its growing obsession with anti-Communism. That Taft had voted against NATO and other programs that were part of the effort to check the Soviets in Europe. In his speeches, he systematically downplayed the Soviet military threat, and he often scolded the administration for inflated rhetoric about the Communist danger, which he said was provocative to the Russians. He feared the dynamic of the Cold War would turn America into the policeman of the world, transforming it from a democracy to an imperial power, a role, he believed, for which we were ill suited.
Then there was the other Taft, who could exploit the fall of China and attack the administration for being soft on Communism. He spoke of sending the Navy to help Chiang and of giving military aid in China as he would not in Europe. Slowly, he came to use the issue of domestic subversion. He referred to people in the State Department who were “liquidating” the Chinese Nationalists, and he said that State “was guided by a left-wing group who have obviously wanted to get rid of Chiang and were willing at least to turn China over to the Communists for that purpose.” He voted against confirmation of George Marshall as secretary of defense.
For men like Taft the use of the Communist issue was a way of gaining some revenge after years in which the Democrats had portrayed Republican domestic policies as cold and heartless. Taft himself had been the target of unusually cruel assaults, which portrayed him as a pawn of the rich.
Two pieces of literature used against Taft were particularlynasty. One was a booklet mocking his life. Supposedly, as a small boy in the Philippines, he had been stung by a jellyfish. “This too,” went the book, “must have made a deep impression on Taft. It may have been the start of his
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