Joe McCarthy Reconsidered

By Jeff Lukens

Charged with inciting a fraudulent Red Scare in the nation and soiling the names of many innocent persons, Senator Joseph McCarthy is regarded today as a fanatic, a bully, and a demagogue. He has been assessed by history to be so detestable the term “McCarthyism” amounts to being a witch-hunting extremist.

However, irrefutable evidence now exists of a constant Communist push in the 1940s and 50s to infiltrate our government, uncover its secrets, and degrade its security. Evidence shows that communists had, indeed, entered the highest levels of the U.S. government. Most surprising of all, U.S. officials safeguarding this threat not only allowed it to happen but actively covered it up. All of this was just as Joe McCarthy contended.

The FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the atomic bomb project, was a known Communist party member. Furthermore, U.S. officials were alerted that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy years before the Hiss scandal became headline news, and Soviet spies had deeply infiltrated the State Department. All this happened before McCarthy caught the nation’s attention.

The United States was under assault by the Soviets and their proxies then every bit as much as we are under assault by the Communist Chinese Party today. After the war, Communists were in control of Eastern Europe, and in 1949 they conquered China. The Soviets exploded their first nuclear bomb that year with the help of their American spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg…