So it's over. No good crying over spilt milk. Except that we never seem to learn.
It happened in 1994, and although President Clinton pulled himself together and performed a near-miraculous turnaround to win election for a second term in 1996, as I recorded in Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency, that didn't mean the disease was eradicated. On the contrary, it grew more virulent, and subjected his administration, and the country, to an even more embarrassing example of American self-destructiveness than Gingrich's crazy shutdown of the government in 1995. Namely, the year-long shutdown of serious and substantive politics in America in 1998-9, when Republicans insisted on impeaching the President for grave "crimes and misdemeanors."
The disease is the politics of personal destruction. Lee Atwater had perfected this during the election of President George H.W. Bush in 1988; Karl Rove and others have used it with such nefarious effect in election after election, ever since.
It's a disease that is damned hard to treat. In American Caesars I instance the moments when two great American presidents declined to use the surgical method: by simply destroying the invading pathogen with the knife they possessed. During the Korean War, for example, President Truman, had a home version of terrorism to deal with: the rise of Senator Joe McCarthy.
"Alarmed lest the unity of the nation, in a grave national emergency, be subverted by the Wisconsin demagogue," I wrote in American Caesars:
President Truman summoned a meeting of advisers on February 28, 1951. Congressional privilege had allowed McCarthy to speak without danger of libel, encouraging "hectoring and innuendo," "dirty tricks," and a "bully's delight in the ruin of innocents." Where would it end, the President asked, and what would they suggest he do?
The Attorney General had come prepared for just such a question -- and to the assembled group he confided he had a "thick and devastating dossier" on McCarthy and his corrupt financial and private life, including details of his bedmates over recent years -- "enough to blow Senator McCarthy's show sky high."
The President banged the table with the flat of his hand -- but, fatefully, it was not to announce they now had the means to expose the Wisconsin phony. The writer John Hersey, who was present, later recalled Truman's reasons for not leaking the dossier. "You must not ask the President of the United States to get down in the gutter with a guttersnipe. Nobody, not even the President, can approach too close to a skunk, in skunk territory, and expect to get anything out of it except a bad smell. If you think someone is telling a lie about you, the only way to answer is with the whole truth."
This was Trumanian naiveté of a tragic kind. The result would be worse than anyone imagined. As one cultural chronicler of the period, Joseph Goulden, noted, fear, apathy and ignorance meant that, "for a full decade, that of the 1950's, America went into a holding period -- intellectually, morally, politically." Dean Acheson, Truman's valiant Secretary of State, would write of "1950's shameful and nihilistic orgy" of "irresponsible character assassination" -- which had a dire effect on the U.S. government, as well as American universities, the civil services (whose members had to submit to loyalty oaths and FBI investigation), and China studies -- requiring "a decade to recover from this sadistic pogrom." Clark Clifford -- who was present at the McCarthy-dossier meeting, later wrote: "It is easy to make light of McCarthy today, when even conservatives use the word 'McCarthyism' to mean unfair political smear tactics -- but the harsh fact, which must never be forgotten, is that until he destroyed himself [...] Joe McCarthy literally terrorized Washington and much of the nation" -- thereby giving free ammunition to actual Communists abroad, who could legitimately describe America as a quasi-police state, not a genuine democracy. Too honorable to sink to McCarthy's level, Truman had thereby permitted McCarthy to pursue his "tricks" for a further three years - and his influence for even longer.
Even the next president, a Republican, refused to "get down in the gutter" to silence the Wisconsin madman. McCarthy, I wrote:
was a strangely repellent demagogue, the last of a breed of politicians who for centuries had grabbed headlines in print, and by their congressional immunity were able to lie and libel with impunity. Like his predecessor in the Oval Office, Eisenhower refused to speak to or deal directly with McCarthy, declaring privately, "I will not get into a pissing contest with that skunk." The President tellingly blamed "the people who have built him up, namely writers, editors, publishers. I really believe," Eisenhower noted in his diary, "that nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of troublemaking as to ignore him. This he cannot stand."
Eisenhower was right about McCarthy's reaction, but wrong about the Senator's troublemaking -- never dreaming that Senator McCarthy go for the very organization the President most revered: the U.S. Army."
The story of how McCarthy finally overreached, and was exposed in the glare of national television by the U.S. Army's chief counsel, Joseph Welch ("Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness... Have you no decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?") is one of the great moments of moral if belated grandeur in American history - as well as President Eisenhower's summons to Welch to come to the White House, where the President congratulated him. "You handled a tough job like a champion," Eisenhower beamed
McCarthy's poison had taken years to combat, however - ruining untold numbers of lives in the course of its deliberate epidemic.
Today we face a different form of threat to our democracy: the willful demonization of public servants and political opponents, and they use of vast amounts of anonymously-donated funds to do so in election campaigns.
Must we wait for that poison to work its way through and out of our political system? And if so, for how many years? What can be done?
Nigel Hamilton's "American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush" was published in September (Yale). Nigel will be interviewed about the book on C-Span 2 Booktv "After Words" by Richard Norton Smith, this Saturday at 10 pm (EST), and Sunday at 9 pm and 11 pm. The final question Nigel fields in the program is: "What do you think of Fox News?"