Senator Joseph McCarthy and Roy M. Cohn

Senator Joseph McCarthy and Roy M. Cohn

The conventional view of McCarthy's fall turns on his erratic performance during the Army hearings. But Roy Cohn believed something deeper was also at work. "Undoubtedly the hearings were a setback," Cohn recalled. "But there were other perhaps more fundamental reasons for his decline. By the time the hearings ended, McCarthy had been the center of the national and world spotlight for three and a half years. He had an urgent universal message, and people, whether they idolized or hated him, listened. Almost everything he said or did was chronicled."

That surfeit of attention, Cohn argued, itself contributed to McCarthy's decline. "Human nature being what it is, any outstanding actor on the stage of public affairs - and especially a holder of high office - cannot remain indefinitely at the center of controversy," Cohn recalled. "The public must eventually lose interest in him and his cause. And Joe McCarthy and nothing to offer but more of the same. The public sought new thrills. … The surprise, the drama, we're gone."

To everything, in other words, there is a season, and McCarthy's hubris hastened the end of his hour upon the stage. "I was fully aware of McCarthy's faults which were neither few nor minor," Cohn recalled. "He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had - in order to draw attention to the rock-bottom seriousness of the situation. He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion make challengeable statements."

To urge to overstate to overdramatize, to dominate the news, could be costly, and so it proved to be for McCarthy. The Wisconsin Senator, Cohn said, was essentially a salesman." he was selling the story of America's peril," Cohn recalled. "He knew that he would never hope to convince anybody by delivering a dry, general-accounting-office type of presentation. In consequence, he stepped up circumstances a notch or two" - and in so doing he opened himself to attacks that proved fatal. He oversold, and the customers - the public - tired of the pitch, and the pitch man.

(Source: The Soul of America - The Battle For Our Better Angels - by Jon Meacham, Page 202 and 203)

Dick Henthorn
13 Feb 2019

Harry S Truman on The Presidency

[Harry S Truman]
In his postpresidential notes, Harry Truman was candid about the tricky nature of democracy. Yes, much of the nation's fate lies in the hands of the president, but the voters have the ultimate Authority. “The country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get,” Truman wrote. “And when they elect a man to the presidency who doesn't take care of the job, they've got nobody to blame but themselves.”

(Source: The Soul of America - The Battle For Our Better Angels - by Jon Meacham, Page 265)

Dick Henthorn
13 Feb 2019

African American History Month - 2019

[In October 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House.]

Roosevelt knew the notices were rough. “As things turned out I'm very glad that I asked him,” he wrote a correspondent after the Washington dinner, “for the clamor aroused by the act makes me feel as if the act was necessary.” TR’s reflections on the invitation tell us much about the era. Though asking Washington to dine was a pioneering act, the president was not a civil rights pioneer in the ways we, from a different century and a different context, might hope to find. For his time, however, Roosevelt was closer to the side of the angels than many other Americans were. “I have not been able to think about any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent,” he wrote but one thing I am sure, and that is that inasmuch as he is here and can neither be killed or driven away, the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have,” continuing:

I say that I am “sure” this is the right solution. Of course I know that we see through a glass dimly, and, after all, it may be that I am wrong; but if I am, then all my thoughts and beliefs are wrong, and my whole way of looking at life is wrong. At any rate, while I am in public life, however short a time that may be, I am in honor bound to act up to my beliefs and convictions.

(Source: The Soul of America - The Battle For Our Better Angels - by Jon Meacham, Page 87 and 88)

Dick Henthorn

12 Feb 2019