Martin Meenagh blog

Dwight David Eisenhower was elected in defiance of his party’s isolationist instincts. In 1952, Robert Taft and John Bricker, both of Ohio, were much more in sympathy with Republican members; in those primaries that were held, Taft won 35% overall to Eisenhower’s 26%. In addition, during the Republican convention—which was entered with no candidate having a majority—Eisenhower’s supporters had to resort to rule changes to exclude Taft’s Southern supporters and to secure the nomination. The furious reaction to these events of Taft followers, such as the highly influential Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, illustrated how far from the GOP mainstream ‘Ike’ was, and was the principal reason why Eisenhower was saddled with Richard Nixon as a running mate and a requirement that, at some point, he shake the hand of Joe McCarthy. The circumstances of Eisenhower’s nomination may not seem immediately relevant to the foreign policy pursued by his administration, but in truth they are. Ei...

The question above carries an implication that the Soviet challenge to the West could in some way have been unreal, at least in terms of espionage. There has been, certainly since the 1947 Red Scare and the subsequent rise from 1951 of Joseph McCarthy, a tendency in the West to view the Cold War effort to find and to stop Soviet subversion as ‘paranoid.’ Books and articles have embedded in the public consciousness the idea that Allen and John Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, Howard Hunt, Cord Meyer, Curtis LeMay, Lyman Lemnitzer, Edward Teller, J.Edgar Hoover, and dozens of other strange, multi-level figures were in some way delusional in the pursuit of their undeniable anticommunist obsessions, and also that they were representative of the anti-communist effort. A parallel perspective has also arisen which holds that the security structure created between 1947 and 1961, covering the emergence in 1946 of the Strategic Air Command, the CIA, Department of Defense, and National Securi...

Joseph Macarthy was the Senator from Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Between 1947 and 1950, he was little known except for funding scandals and an attempt to prevent the execution of SS prisoners in Europe who had been convicted of involvement in the Malmedy massacre, on the basis that there was corrupting evidence that the US had employed torture in gaining confessions. He was unpopular with the press corps, and widely disliked inside the beltway for removing his predecessor, a distinguished member of the Progressive LaFollette family, in a dirty campaign in 1946. Between 1950 and 1954 McCarthy enjoyed spectacular prominence as an Inquisitor and hounder of putative and alleged Communists in the American government, executive, and entertainment industries. He fell from this version of grace in 1954 when he challenged the US Army, and specifically its dentists, and then descended into a relatively irrelevant alcoholism before dying at Bethesda naval hospital quickly and u...