fascism, the Communist Party attracted many,
including intellectuals, who were idealists and
wanted to create a better world. Newspapers and
books were at that time revealing the concentra-
tion camps and brutalities of Nazi Germany. The
horrors of Stalin’s Russia, the chain of forced
labour camps, the Gulag, were carefully hidden
from view. The Soviet Union was shut off from the
West – unlike Nazi Germany – and a few naive vis-
itors, including the Dean of Canterbury, were
shown only the country’s happy face and then
returned to the West to write ecstatic accounts of
what they had seen. The admiration for the Red
Army and the Soviet people, officially blessed by
Allied propaganda during the Second World War,
persuaded others into temporary support of com-
munism.
For most of these Western communists, disil-
lusionment set in steadily after 1945 with the
growing evidence of the Soviet suppression of
freedom in Eastern and central Europe. By the
time of the crushing of the Hungarian rising in
1956 no illusions could remain. Many commu-
nists of the 1930s had left the party by then; sub-
stantial numbers had fallen for the propaganda of
one of the communist front organisations only
when young, in their student days. There were
indeed thousands, and some had entered govern-
ment service. McCarthy thus could build up fears
on a basis of fact. But these men and women were
not automatically disloyal to their country or sub-
servient to foreign masters. The few who were fre-
quently served Moscow for gain or out of twisted
psychological motives. There will always be spies
and traitors as long as nations are locked in hostile
confrontation. The evil result of McCarthyism
was to smear everyone with the same broad
brush, whether there was good, flimsy or no evi-
dence. The senator appealed to low instincts of
envy, of dislike for the intellectual establishment,
and so struck a chord of meanness and worse. An
atmosphere of fear began to prevail, which eroded
civil liberties.
Truman condemned McCarthy in forthright
language. McCarthy, after MacArthur’s dismissal,
even called for Truman’s impeachment; he next
attacked General George Marshall, arguably
America’s architect of military victory during the
Second World War and later Truman’s secretary
of state, as part of ‘a conspiracy so immense, an
infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of
man’. The Truman administration tried to meet
public worries aroused by McCarthyism about
communism by introducing loyalty checks on
public employees. In the Senate opposition to
McCarthy diminished as his power grew. It
reached its zenith in 1954 during the Eisenhower
administration. McCarthyism represented the
exaggerated reaction of all those who hated the
New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal and civil rights
legislation. They believed that America was suc-
cumbing to creeping socialism and creating an all-
embracing federal state hostile to the sturdy
individualism on which (as they saw it) America
had grown to prosperity and power. McCarthyism
also provided an outlet for the frustration pro-
voked by the realisation that the world could not
be shaped in the image of the US. Communism
had made enormous advances and was a potent
force for change: the US had failed to halt its
progress and had, in the McCarthyites’ view, ‘lost
China’. They railed against the limitations of
America’s global policies and claimed that the lim-
itations were self-imposed, because the policies
themselves had been inspired from within by com-
munists. Setting aside the evils of the McCarthyite
smear tactics, what many Americans found hard to
accept was that the Second World War had not
settled global problems, had not proved to be the
war that ends all war.