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Originally Posted by charlieo1126@gmail.com
Yes he was able to keep his head , McCarthy had him thrown out of the National Union but he kept his iron workers Union card he did have a lot of resentment because of the the many lives destroyed by one man., I hear they still honor his memory in his home town .
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There was an interesting column written about McCarthy - but much more broadly about whether anything McCarthy was trumpeting at the time had any truth to it insofar as the left side of politics was concerned. It was written in the Washington Post in 1996 by the late Nicholas von Hoffman, and titled "Was McCarthy right about the left?"
von Hoffman was no friend of right-wingers, and he wrote what he believed. His words ended up getting him fired from CBS's 60 Minutes, actually, when he referred to Nixon as "a dead mouse on the kitchen floor that everyone was afraid to touch and throw in the garbage.”
von Hoffman was a community organizer for Saul Alinksy in the early 60's. von Hoffman was a left-winger, to be sure.
OK, back to the column -
von Hoffman found nothing redeeming in McCarthy's behavior. Here's how he characterized him:
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Originally Posted by von Hoffman
McCarthy, as his subsequent history would show, knew little about communism, on this side of the ocean or the other. This loutish, duplicitous bully, who carried, not the names of Reds but bottles of hootch in his briefcase died in disgrace and of alcoholism.
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There is a "but..." here, though. The next passage from von Hoffman reads this way:
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Originally Posted by von Hoffman
Yet, in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. He just didn't know their names.
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Last summary:
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Originally Posted by von Hoffman
An adequate history of the McCarthy/Truman period, one that gives proper attention to the class, ethnic, religious and cultural antagonisms of those times, has not yet been written. But enough new information has come to light about the communists in the U.S. government that we may now say that point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-5f352acbf5de/