The Party’s Over

Began with Eisenhower.

Dwight D. Eisenhower surrendered to Joe McCarthy on a train.

In October 1952, Ike, the heroic World War II general who nabbed the GOP presidential nomination running as a moderate, was campaigning in Wisconsin with the nation’s No. 1 Red-baiter. Two years earlier, Wisconsin’s junior senator had claimed he possessed a list of 205 Communist Party members “working and shaping policy” in the State Department. That was a lie. But McCarthy helped trigger a national panic over supposed commie infiltration and became a powerhouse within the GOP. His reckless conspiracy-mongering reached a new height in 1951 when he accused the Truman administration of scheming to deliver the nation “to disaster” with an “immense” conspiracy. And McCarthy fingered the ultimate villain: George Marshall, the secretary of defense who had helped create the postwar recovery program for Europe known as the Marshall Plan. McCarthy alleged that Marshall was deliberately weakening the United States so it would fall to the Soviet Union.

This conspiratorial nuttery—designed to prey on Cold War paranoia—struck a chord with millions of voters, and McCarthy was lionized at the GOP convention the following year. Eisenhower believed McCarthy to be a dangerous demagogue and fabricator, and he especially seethed at the attack on his friend Marshall. Yet in the 1952 campaign, Ike was expected to campaign side by side with—and legitimize—this scoundrel who was up for reelection….

That night, in his speech, Eisenhower cautioned against the “spirit of violent vigilantism” in the fight for freedom. But he decried left-wing “contamination” in “virtually every department…of our government” and called for “the right to call a Red a Red.” Rather than assail McCarthyism, he sounded as if he were defending it. The Milwaukee Journal observed, “The general went far toward surrendering ethical and moral principles in a frenzied quest for votes.”