Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy

As the title suggests, this brief, (I read this book during a flight delay at O'Hare), but interesting book chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of Joe McCarthy from 1950-54, (from his West Virginia speech to his censure), and his controversial impact on US history during that time. Although there is a brief biographical sketch of the subject, (juxtaposing McCarthy's incredible and at times admirable drive to succeed with his carelessness with facts, the truth and people), there isn't much analysis or historical perspective here. This isn't a knock of the book - just a description. (For a more detailed analysis of communism in the US - Reds by Ted Morgan; for a more in depth bio of McCarthy - Thomas Reeves). If you are looking for an introduction or a refresher to McCarthy and the "ism" that bears his name, this very readable book will not disappoint.

Tom Wicker always had an ability to break down rather complex news into brief, but always incisive, articles and columns in his years at the New York Times. "Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy" proves no exception. I first became aware of this book in a terrific review done by Anthony Lewis in the June 8, 2006 New York Review of Books. As is often the case with that publication, if you don't have the time, or the inclination, for the full read the reviews are truly the finest in the publishing business. It is interesting that the review truly feels as "long" as Wickers entire book (not really unusual). What Wicker does that makes the book compelling is to demonstrate that while McCarthy was the "right" man for his abborant demagoguary, the time was ripe with the Soviet Union growing as a menace and a natural enemy after being an ally durine WWII. Wicker futher demonstrates in many ways how effectively no one, not even Eisenhower, was able to stand up to McCarthy and his outright lies. The press was not without its complicity as it eagerly sought his one line headlines but did not do its role, even a modicum of it, as a "watchdog" of our government. The citizenry - also guilty of allowing such a stain on our history. There is much to be learned from this short read. Not least of which is that our system of checks and balances AND the media and voters ability to question ALWAYS should go on without threats and retributions. Sound familiar? I would imagine if old Joe were still alive he would only grant interviews to Fox News.

The recent movie _Good Night and Good Luck_, about Edward R. Murrow, was the first introduction many young Americans had to the junior senator from Wisconsin of the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy. There are stories that say that test audiences reported they liked the movie, but thought that the performance by whoever was playing McCarthy was exaggerated and unbelievable. There was nothing the producers could do; they had decided that no one could play McCarthy but McCarthy, and his scenes were archival films of himself, saying his own lines with his own dramatic intonations. It is too bad for our nation that McCarthy was not just some movie monster, but was all too real. In _Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy_ (Harcourt), Tom Wicker has given a brief but engrossing biography of an amazing character who changed our nation. Wicker points out that no one speaks about such concepts as Trumanism or Hooverism or Nixonism, but McCarthyism (my spellchecker does not question this word) is an idea which remains in our history and may be activated again. Wicker shows that there was more to the man than just demagoguery or power-grabbing. He was "witty, intelligent, a scintillating conversationalist, and enterprising". When he started running for elections, he crisscrossed Wisconsin, emphasizing his (exaggerated) war record, and impressing young voters with his interpersonal skills; he had an almost perfect recollection of names and faces and could call by name people he had barely met on previous stumpings. He made little impression as a senator when he got to Washington in 1946, but then gave a fateful Lincoln Day address in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950. His speech simply reflected standing Republican horror of communists, fellow-travelers, reds, and pinks, and he "had nothing new or original to add to the campaign - save, crucially, the drama, hyperbole, and audacity of which he quickly showed himself a master." His style of presentation was impressive, and especially his assertion that "I hold here in my hand" a list of names of commies working in the state department. He angered and alienated even those who agreed with him, like J. Edgar Hoover, who could not abide McCarthy's wild accusations which did not have, as he put it, "preliminary spade work" to back them up. By the time of Murrow's _See It Now_ broadcast in 1954, McCarthy's approval rating was slipping, although he insisted that all attacks on him were attempts to force him to drop enquiries into commies all over the government. In April 1954, the famous Army-McCarthy hearings were broadcast in their entirety, and got a 68% share of the television audience. McCarthy violated a lawyerly agreement that he would not bring up the former membership in a possible communist front organization by a lawyer in the firm of the Army's lawyer Joseph Welch. Welch was thereby able to give his famous "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" speech, and McCarthy was doomed. He d

Joe McCarthy rose to public acclaim back in 1950 when his hunt for members of the Communist Party within the U.S. government itself resulted in a virtual witch hunt of political figures, then American citizens, who were members. While anticommunist was already a Republican Party cause, McCarthy took it a step further and elevated it to new levels - yet five years later he was condemned by his own party. SHOOTING STAR: THE BRIEF ARC OF JOE MCCARTHY explores his rapid rise and fall, with a journalist's eye to uncovering the underlying motivation to his actions. An impressive survey and biographical sketch emerges. Diane C. Donovan, Editor California Bookwatch

Robert Kennedy's assessment of Joseph McCarthy, quoted a time or two in Tom Wicker's SHOOTING STAR, sums it up pretty well. Wicker explores some of that complexity in this brief survey of the `arc' period of McCarthy's senate career, a time span roughly covering his infamous Lincoln Day's speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950 to a senate vote of censure against him in the fall of 1954. Before the censure, though, McCarthy battled presidents, the bureaucracy, and the military in his tireless quest to ferret out the communist menace. Few in America have risen to such dizzying heights of power, influence and fame, fewer yet have suffered such a precipitous fall. Truman is president and the Russians are testing the A-bomb. Spies are selling our atomic secrets to them and someone recently `lost' mainland China to the communists when McCarthy's star ignited and went super-nova after the Lincoln Day's speech. For a brief span he was powerful enough to attack presidents Republican and Democrat, attack the iconic General George Marshall, attack even the United States army. "With his command of drama and deception," Wicker writes, "his reckless intuition, and his thirst for distinction, he had shrewdly exploited the dark places of the American psyche." There's a raft of books on McCarthy and McCarthyism, and if truth be told Wicker doesn't add anything new to the story. A decade or so ago Wicker wrote a book on another of Herblock's unshaven thugs - Richard Nixon. In the prologue to One of Us the Young Reporter spots a glowering, eye-averting Nixon slouching through a Washington government building. Wicker repeats the device in SHOOTING STAR when he recalls meeting an inebriated and disheveled, but outgoing and friendly, Joe McCarthy in a senate building in 1957, long after the senator's fall from grace. Journalists can make notoriously frustrating historians, especially those who write about events they covered, and Wicker was covering Washington within a few years of McCarthy's censure. The good ones, and Wicker is one of the best, excel at description but tend to falter at analysis. What he comes up with is a McCarthy who is something more than a demagogue, something less than a true believer. SHOOTING STAR is a relatively short book, closer to a detailed essay than a full-blown history. In the prologue Wicker claims he became fascinated with McCarthy when writing a book on Eisenhower. The result of that fascination is a book that describes, in satisfying detail, the many battles of Joe McCarthy. Less satisfying is its explanation and analyses of those battles. Recommended especially for those who don't want to tackle a full-blown biography but are interested in a lively, well-written account of McCarthy's rise and fall.