To Tell the Truth, Mr. President

Review by Bill Doughty

Autocratic dictators lie.

So said President Harry S. Truman, American everyman leader-philosopher.

"The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why people, will believe it," Truman wrote, as quoted in Jon Meacham's insightful "The Soul of America" (Random House, 2018). "Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they'll believe it and go along with you," Truman wrote.

Our previous Navy Reads post shows some of the ways the Navy was influential in history – an unintended subtext in Meacham's book. This blogpost focuses on Truman's and other leaders' roles, especially during the Cold War, when democracy was threatened by a politician who sought to divide people with fear, hate and intolerance: Wisconsin's Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

Using fear, religion and his version of patriotism, McCarthy spewed the conspiracy theory of a deep state with communists behind every tree. Meacham reports McCarthy's words: "'Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity,' McCarthy told the Ohio County Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on Thursday, February 9, 1950."

McCarthy reveling in headlines about himself.

McCarthy "exploited the privileges of power and prominence without regard to its responsibilities; to him politics was not about the substantive but the sensational," Meacham writes. "A master of false charges, or conspiracy-tinged rhetoric, and of calculated disregard for conventional figures (from Truman and Eisenhower to [Gen. George C.] Marshall), McCarthy could distract the public, play the press, and change the subject – all while keeping himself at center stage."

"McCarthy was an opportunist, uncommitted to much beyond his own fame and influence."

"How he loved the story of himself as a brave warrior, a story that dominated the newspapers of the day. McCarthy needed the press, and the press came to need McCarthy. He was fantastic copy, a real life serial. The twists and turns of the McCarthy saga meant more bylines for the reporters, more exciting headlines for the editors, and, given the subject matter – alleged infiltration of the government of the United States by a fatal foe – more copies sold for the owners. Radio and television amplified McCarthy's impact."

He manipulated the media and news cycles and kept the spotlight on himself. He advocated for banning books by authors such as Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" because of the author's leftist leanings.

McCarthy and Cohn

According to McCarthy's own New York attorney, Roy M. Cohn, who ultimately turned on his boss by reflecting about McCarthy: "He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had ... He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements," Cohn said.

"He saw the dramatic political opportunities connected with a fight on Communism. McCarthy was gifted with a sense of political timing," Cohn added. "Sometimes he misjudged, but on balance his sense of what made drama and headlines was uncommonly good."

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith

Allied against McCarthy were Eleanor Roosevelt, who compared McCarthy's tactics to "hitlerism"; Winston Churchill, who called for defending "the Anglo-American tradition of fair play"; Maine's Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who said McCarthy created "a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and everything that we Americans hold dear"; editor Palmer Hoyt, who told his reporters to call out lies when statements were "demonstrably false"; reporter Edward R. Murrow, who said, "We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men"; and (former Army captain) Truman, who believed in telling the truth in plain English.

"On Thursday, March 30, 1950, at a press conference at his Florida retreat in Key West – where Truman could indulge his fondness for Hawaiian shirts, bourbon and poker – the president told the assembled journalists exactly what he believed, 'I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy,' Truman said ... The net effect of the McCarthyite campaign,Truman said, was to undermine confidence in the country in a time of cold war. 'To try to sabotage the foreign policy of the United States,' he said,'is just as bad in this cold war as it would be to shoot our soldiers in the back in a hot war."

Young Navy war hero Sen. John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy aligned themselves with McCarthy in the early 1950s and later regretted it. RFK even served as a young lawyer on McCarthy's staff.

McCarthy tried to associate himself with a hero of naval history when his adversaries spoke out against him:

"In the early 1950s legions of people were entranced by McCarthy's Manichaean vision of life. He spoke in the starkest of terms, savoring superlatives. Everything was dramatic, contentious, perilous: So few things, McCarthy implied, stood between American freedom and Communist slavery. But one of those things – perhaps the most important of them – was McCarthy himself, who quoted John Paul Jones: 'I have just begun to fight.'"

Eisenhower failed to take on McCarthy when he became president, but he did address the nation about resisting fear. "His April 1954 speech about fear, which falls about midway between these landmarks (of his speeches about D-Day landings and warning about the 'military-industrial complex') ... described the disposition necessary to survive life in an age of strain and uncertainly.'"

Department of Army attorney Welch and Sen. McCarthy in Senate hearing."Have you no sense of decency?"

McCarthy's downfall came after Eisenhower's speech on fear, Murrow's public denunciation and an event that occurred in Congress involving the U.S. Army and Roy M. Cohn, when McCarthy seemed to slander and call into question the integrity of an army lawyer.

"In an iconic moment, the counsel for the army, Joseph N. Welch, attacked the senator, who had clumsily attempted to impugn the loyalty of a young lawyer on Welch's team. 'Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your selfishness,' Welch told McCarthy. 'Little did I dream you would be so reckless and cruel to do injury to that lad ... I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think that I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.' McCarthy blundered forward and took up the theme again. Welch was ready and struck with force. 'You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? You have done enough. Have you left no sense of decency?'"

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sen. Prescott Bush

Meacham points out that even after the wind left McCarthy's sails, he still had a base support within the country, with 34 percent still backing him. It took a Senate censure to finally evaporate his power. Among those senators who spoke in favor of censure was a senior senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush, father of President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush.

"When Joe McCarthy died at Bethesda Naval Hospital on Thursday, May 2, 1957, he was once more the center of attention," Meacham writes. "'Years will pass before the results of his work can be objectively evaluated,' Vice President Nixon said, 'but his friends and many of his questions will not question his devotion to what he considered to be the best interests of his country.'"

Meacham's book serves a tray of rich appetizers from history. He reveals how Americans have survived division and dissension, how we've been able to vanquish real threats to our democracy and live up to our ideals set forth by the nation's founders. We're left hungry to learn more, and fortunately we have a list of books and authors from Meacham, both in the chapters and in the extensive bibliography, all of which contributed in some way to the soul.

For example:

Garry Wills's "Inventing America"

The works of Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, Emerson and Thoreau

Corey Robin's "Fear: the History of a Political Idea"

Jacob A. Riis's "How the Other Half Live"

Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here"

Nathaniel West's "A Cool Million"

Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"

Robert Penn Warren's "Segregation" and "The Legacy of the Civil War"

John Lewis's "Walking with the Wind"

Authors: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Alexis de Tocqueville, Stephen Ambrose, Taylor Branch, W.E.B. Dubois, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Eric Foner, Chris Matthews, Theodore C. Sorensen, Thomas Aquinas, Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough and Fareed Zakaria, among scores of others.

Meacham dedicates the book to fellow historians Evan Thomas and Michael Beschloss. "They are reassuring, selfless, and kind."

"The Soul of America" is a recent #1 New York Times bestseller, supplanted this week by Navy veteran Senator John McCain's "The Restless Wave" (Simon and Schuster, 2018).

In closing, we share these words from Thomas Paine, quoted early in Meacham's book: "As in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king."

Remembering the thoughts of Truman and Paine: Dictators and kings who think they have absolute power lie. The law – based on the Constitution, the support of the American people and the better angels of our nature – stands for truth.

A Heated Senate; ‘No Sense of Decency’

Review by Bill Doughty

Another book adds to the understanding of McCarthyism and how it infected the body politic in the United States but failed to destroy the U.S. military and other pillars of democracy –– despite leaving lasting ailments.

Robert Shogan presents vignettes and the cast of characters in “No Sense of Decency: The Army-McCarthy Hearings: A Demagogue Falls and Television Takes Charge of American Politics” (Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2009).

Shogan shows how the U.S. Senate in the early 1950s, aided and abetted by a willing media, fueled McCarthy’s conspiracy theories and attacks on democracy under the veil of patriotism. President Eisenhower said, “It saddens me that I must feel ashamed for the United States Senate.”

McCarthy’s legacy is one of lies and prevarication, breaking of norms, disrespect for rules and codes of conduct, prioritizing personality over substance, and a love for power and personal ambition over public interest.

In our previous post, we covered other parallels between McCarthyism and Trumpism as revealed in Larry Tye’s “Demagogue.” Shogan’s “No Sense of Decency" reveals more links and parallels. 

For instance:

Gen. George Marshall

McCarthy’s slander of war heroes, including General Marshall, a leader in World War II and a chief military advisor to President Truman as well as Secretary of State (p. 75) reads like Donald Trump’s reported disrespect for fallen soldiers and his slander of Senator John McCain, a Navy veteran and Vietnam War POW.

McCarthy attacked opponents’ family members, including Maj. Gen. Miles Reber’s brother as part of his Big Lie conspiracies. (p. 146)

Despite haranguing people who used the fifth amendment, McCarthy became known as the “Fifth Amendment Senator” when he, himself, was under investigation. (p. 244)

McCarthy weakened and divided his Republican Party but ironically brought about some bipartisanship in how the Senate eventually dealt with him, leading to a vote for censorship. (p. 248)

Shogan writes:

“The Senate faced a tortuous choice. For many of its members, conscience and a sense of obligation toward the legislative body whose prerogatives McCarthy now professed to be defending inclined them in favor of censure. But for many –– including those leading toward censure –– political considerations raised a red flag. McCarthy may have lost ground with the majority of Americans, but he still had a hard cadre of supporters, and these partisans felt bound even closer by the threat of censure.”

Sen. Joseph McCarthy

In the end, McCarthy refused to apologize.“He now wanted to become a victim and to use his martyrdom to expand and strengthen his own personal political base outside the Republican Party,” Shogan writes.

The characters in the Senate seventy years ago during the McCarthy hearings included young John F. Kennedy, democratic leader Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Stuart Symington, Everett Dirkson, Margaret Chase Smith, and Prescott Bush (father and grandfather of future presidents). Many of the senators were military veterans of World War II; some fought in World War I or in earlier conflicts.

Studying the list of senators from the 82nd and 83rd Congress (during McCarthy’s reign of terrorizing), it’s fascinating to see how many were born before the turn of the 20th century. Their parents or grandparents fought in or lived through the Civil War. The oldest senator in the group, Theodore F. Green of Rhode Island, was born in 1867 and served as a first lieutenant in the Spanish-American War.

Senator John F. Kennedy

All of the senators lived through the 1918 pandemic, including JFK, born May 29, 1917 and Russell Billiu Long, born Nov. 3, 1918. Long, who served as a Navy lieutenant in World War II, commanded a landing craft transport vessel. (He was the son of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long.) None lived long enough to see the current coronavirus pandemic.

“No Sense of Decency” is a well-written, fast-paced accounting of the people, legacy, politics, and characters surrounding Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism.

“The politics of fear and paranoia, while they ebbed and flowed, never really went away,” Shogan concludes.

Reading about the history of the Cold War in general and McCarthyism in particular provides an insight to help understand current surrealism –– as well as other isms and ailments in its wake.

‘Gutsy’ Women Knocking on the Door

Review by Bill Doughty

In an iconic photo, four Asian American Pacific Islander women at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard train in firefighting. Long mislabeled as taken during the attack of Dec. 7, 1941, the photo in fact portrays some of  the strong women who applied to support the Navy’s war efforts in the wake of that attack. From left to right: Elizabeth Moku, Alice Cho, Katherine Lowe, and Hilda Van Gieson.

Over time, history usually has a way of sorting out fact from fiction.

Rear Adm.Grace Hopper, "Mother of Computing"

The facts and highlights of strong women of grit and grace are spotlighted in a book recommended for Women’s History Month. Profiles of more than 100 women come to life in “The Book of Gutsy Women” by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton (Simon & Schuster, 2019).

Among the women profiled are some we featured in Navy Reads posts: Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, Rachel Carson, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Margaret Chase Smith, Malala Yousafzai, and Maya Angelou. This book includes mini-biographies of both famous (Clara Barton, Helen Keller, Ida B. Wells, Maya Lin, Gabby Giffords, Greta Thunberg, and Venus and Serena Williams) as well as less-well-known women (Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Dr. Gao Yaojie, Nelba Marquez-Greene, Wangari Maathai, and Jineth Bedoya Lima).

Chelsea and Hillary Clinton, 2011

Hillary and Chelsea each provide essays about their subjects. They also offer personal perspectives about the women who have inspired and enlightened them – women who have made a difference in the world. The book is organized in sections: early inspirations, education pioneers, earth defenders, explorers and inventors, healers, athletes, advocates and activists, storytellers, elected leaders, groundbreakers, and women’s rights champions.

Chelsea writes, “I learned of Grace (Hopper) in 1996, when the navy named a new ship the USS Hopper (DDG 70) in her honor … I learned even more about her when I spoke many years later at the Grace Hopper celebration, the largest gathering of women technologists in the world.”

Former First Lady, senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reflects about the suffragists who knocked on the door, marched in the street, and fought for women to be able to vote in the United States one hundred years ago. That right was guaranteed with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but it was a right that took decades to apply to women of color:

“Reading the words of the Nineteenth Amendment today, it’s hard not to wonder why it took so long” ‘The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.’ But, of course, it was a long struggle because it was about so much more than the right of women to vote. It was about race, class, and deeply held cultural and religious views about women’s subordinate roles to men in society. It was about men’s –– and some women’s –– insecurities and fears of the unknown. These challenges are still present today.

The franchise –– the basic right of citizenship –– is still being fought over between those of us who believe every citizen should be able to vote and have that vote counted, and those who want to restrict the vote by erecting barriers against people, largely still based on race.”

Celia Ou, a graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, monitors computer screens displaying detailed sonar imaging of the ocean floor aboard the Auxiliary General Oceanographic Research (AGOR) vessel R/V Sally Ride, Dec. 15, 2016. (John F. Williams)

Nearly all the Gutsy women featured in this book faced and overcame some kind of obstacles of discrimination. Chelsea Clinton says this about space pioneer astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space (in 1983) and a champion of STEM education for young people worldwide:

“Even after her death in 2012, Sally Ride kept breaking barriers. She came out as a lesbian quietly, without fanfare … Not long after her death, Tam [O’Shaughnessy, her partner of 27 years] received a call that surprised her, from Ray Mabus, then secretary of the navy. The navy hoped to honor Sally by naming a research vessel after her. Secretary Mabus was calling to ask whether Tam would be the ship’s sponsor – a role that had, up until that point, been filled by the wife of the man for whom the ship was named. ‘I think it is fitting the the celebration of Sally’s legacy as a pioneering space explorer and a role model includes an acknowledgment of who she really was and what she cared about,’ said Tam. The R/V Sally Ride, commissioned in 2016, is the first navy research ship named for a woman. Her legacy lives on in the scientific curiosity sparked in the girls and boys she continues to inspire, the ship that bears her name, and a spot on the moon named after her by NASA.”

Military readers may find fascinating nuggets of history in the essays about Sylvia Earle, Mary McLeod Bethune, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mary Edwards Walker. Chelsea writes this about Walker:

“…Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman in her medical school class at Syracuse Medical College in 1855. She was a practicing physician when the Civil War broke out. She desperately wanted to enlist in the Union Army as a surgeon but wasn’t allowed to because she was a woman. Initially she was called a nurse, since women generally weren’t considered doctors. Because women were not allowed to enlist, Mary had to volunteer, working for free at a temporary hospital, first in Washington and then in Virginia, where she traveled to Union field hospitals across the commonwealth … When her medical credentials were finally accepted she moved to Tennessee and became a War Department surgeon – a paid position that was the equivalent of a lieutenant in status.”

Dr. Sylvia Earle became chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1990. She pioneered research in preserving and protecting the ocean, including the study of damage to coral reefs. Her inspiring TED talk, above, is a call to action. Hillary writes:

“When I think of Sylvia’s work, I am reminded how important it is for all of us to peruse and consider what we want to leave to the generations who come after us –– how they’ll honor the past, imagine the future, and give gifts to those who will live out their lives long after we’re gone. That’s exactly what Sylvia’s life as a scientist, an engineer, a teacher, and an explorer should inspire all of us to do: we must preserve our oceans for the future.”

Last year, this book generated controversy because of the women who were not included. For example, there is an unfortunate dearth of women who have served in or with the military. Surely, the authors could have included a “protectors” section filled with inspiring women who served in uniform.

Despite the intriguing photo on the cover, there is little focus on the women who served on the Homefront during the Second World War. In fact, there’s no explanation of the colorized photo of the women firefighters at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard.

Yet, considering the general lack of attention toward the achievements of women in American and world history for many generations, it is refreshing to see a book of this scope. Women continue to knock on the door, push through the glass ceiling, and demand equality.

“The Book of Gutsy Women” illustrates the strengths of women throughout history, often in the face of sexism, misogyny, harassment, and patriarchy. It highlights the facts of women’s history and showcases women’s contributions to creating a better world now and in the future.