Speaker 1: Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to part two of Joe McCarthy, who has rapidly risen
Speaker 1: to the role of U S. Senator of Wisconsin. Initially
Speaker 1: seen as a moderate Republican, his first few years as
Speaker 1: senator were not especially remarkable. He was noted, however, for
Speaker 1: being an excellent orator, but his reputation would soon change.
Speaker 1: I'm doctor Gale Salts, and this is Personology. My guest
Speaker 1: again today is journalist and author Larry Tye, a New
Speaker 1: York Times bestselling author and author of newly released Demagogue,
Speaker 1: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. We've
Speaker 1: sort of talked about the groundwork as to why Joe
Speaker 1: McCarthy might have been the right person characteriologically to embark
Speaker 1: on what he ultimately did. But there was also, you
Speaker 1: have to say, somewhat of a right person at the
Speaker 1: right time and right place. Right. So it so happened
Speaker 1: that in during the Cold War Jitters rising Uh, the
Speaker 1: House un American Activities Committee becomes a permanent House committee
Speaker 1: having nothing to do with Joe McCarthy himself, so that
Speaker 1: the idea of investigating communist subterfuge becomes a reality in
Speaker 1: the Senate at that time, and concerns about the Cold
Speaker 1: War means that the American public is very comfortable and
Speaker 1: ready to buy into the concern that Communism has to
Speaker 1: be ferreted out in any way possible. So I think
Speaker 1: it goes back to the word opportunists, and there are
Speaker 1: two sides to that word. One is recognizing the opportunity
Speaker 1: and the other is willingness to exploit it. The opportunity
Speaker 1: was there, and that we were I don't know what
Speaker 1: kind of language I can use here, but we were
Speaker 1: scared as heck in terms of what was going on
Speaker 1: in the world. There was a real threat off in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, and there was a real sense in
Speaker 1: America that we could go to nuclear war and kids
Speaker 1: would very shortly be taught on how to duck and
Speaker 1: cover under their desks. That was the response if there
Speaker 1: was a nuclear attack and the time was ripe for
Speaker 1: somebody to come along. And John McCarthy brilliantly understood that fear,
Speaker 1: and like any good opportunist or any good demagogue, knew
Speaker 1: how to play for it, played to it, and he
Speaker 1: played to it not with a realistic and sensible and
Speaker 1: boring response He played to it with dynamism. He played
Speaker 1: to it with dynamite. He played to it by saying
Speaker 1: things that weren't true, but that he knew his listeners
Speaker 1: would want to hear. And he understood that just saying
Speaker 1: that there were maybe traders out there, Um, if you
Speaker 1: did it in general terms, wasn't going to mean anything.
Speaker 1: What you had to do was he had to name
Speaker 1: the traders, and you had to count the traders. And
Speaker 1: he knew how to, in a wild West kind of way,
Speaker 1: go in and really shake things up. You know. He
Speaker 1: stoked general paranoia, right, And of course, as the saying goes,
Speaker 1: just because your paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies.
Speaker 1: So we did have enemies, and people were fearful about that,
Speaker 1: which does tend to ignite more paranoia because there's always
Speaker 1: a kernel of seeds of truth there. And the question,
Speaker 1: you know, so paranoid is a term that went along
Speaker 1: with Joe McCarthy for for many years, uh following his
Speaker 1: death even and the question is really whether we don't
Speaker 1: see a lot of evidence of paranoia before this time, right,
Speaker 1: we don't see him walking around supposing enemies all over
Speaker 1: the place and being paranoid, which is interesting because when
Speaker 1: someone has let's say, paranoid personality disorder, you would expect
Speaker 1: to see it much earlier than this in their life. Uh,
Speaker 1: It's it's true that a traumatic event can happen that
Speaker 1: can change someone's trajectory and make them more paranoid. And
Speaker 1: it's also true, and I think this does become a
Speaker 1: question that substance use and abuse can also heighten a
Speaker 1: person's paranoia. And so we do have to wonder whether
Speaker 1: ultimately that comes to bear in terms of the degree
Speaker 1: of paranoia that he seems to exhibit. But it does
Speaker 1: seem at this juncture that it's more likely that, as
Speaker 1: you said, he sees an opportunity, and he sees that
Speaker 1: the general paranoia that can be ignited and inflamed can
Speaker 1: be an avenue for him playing the role of rescuer
Speaker 1: protector and therefore holding the power holding being the gatekeeper
Speaker 1: and UM, and that's just that is very interesting. Whether
Speaker 1: that ultimately later dovetails with his increasing drinking and as
Speaker 1: we'll get to later, the use of other substances that
Speaker 1: may have heightened his thoughts around this UM is also
Speaker 1: something worth positing. But let's move as you said to UM, Really,
Speaker 1: his launch into McCarthy is m like his launch into
Speaker 1: this whole prosecutorial role. Yes, so I want to just
Speaker 1: revisit paranoia for one second and we can come back
Speaker 1: to this later. UM. I would say that while Um
Speaker 1: he was often called a paranoid, especially in the early days,
Speaker 1: UM he was anything, but he was playing to other
Speaker 1: people's paranoia. But he was seeing things clearly, and he
Speaker 1: knew that he didn't believe in what he was saying.
Speaker 1: I'd love to take your listeners to a moment where
Speaker 1: I think McCarthy is m was born, and that moment
Speaker 1: was in February of nineteen fifty. There is a tradition
Speaker 1: in Republican circles in America that the one night that
Speaker 1: is best to raise money is when you are honoring
Speaker 1: the birthday of the patron saint to the Republican Party,
Speaker 1: Abe Lincoln, And they're famously called Lincoln Day dinners. And
Speaker 1: if you're a prominent U. S. Senator, you get invited
Speaker 1: to places like New York and Boston and San Francisco
Speaker 1: and Chicago. If you're Joe McCarthy, the consummate backbencher who
Speaker 1: looks like he's on his way to defeat. After one term,
Speaker 1: you get invited to Wheeling, West Virginia, which is where
Speaker 1: he gave the speech. That night, he shows up with
Speaker 1: a briefcase with two speeches. One of them is a
Speaker 1: snoozer of a speech on national housing policy that he
Speaker 1: actually knew something about, and had he picked that speech
Speaker 1: that night to deliver you and I seventy years later,
Speaker 1: wouldn't be paying attention to Joe McCarthy. But instead he
Speaker 1: grabbed the other speech in his briefcase, and that is
Speaker 1: a speech on a subject that he knows arguably less
Speaker 1: about than any other member of the U. S. Senate
Speaker 1: in that year of nineteen fifty, and that's a speech
Speaker 1: on the communist threat not in the Soviet Union, but
Speaker 1: behind every pillar in the U. S. State Department. So
Speaker 1: he grabs a sheaf of papers and he waves it
Speaker 1: around like this in the air, saying, I have in
Speaker 1: my hand the list of two hundred and five subversives
Speaker 1: in the State Department, and I have the actual names,
Speaker 1: and I know the jobs they have, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to call on the government to route these people out.
Speaker 1: And it was a passionate speech, and it was a
Speaker 1: brilliant speech, and it was, as his fellow senators would
Speaker 1: later conclude, a fraud in a hoax because a he
Speaker 1: had I don't know what he had in his hand.
Speaker 1: His friends have speculated that it could have been that
Speaker 1: day's racing sheet. But what it was it wasn't a
Speaker 1: list of two hundred and five subversives in the government.
Speaker 1: What it probably was was a list, a recycled list,
Speaker 1: based on the things that I saw in his archives,
Speaker 1: a recycled list of the House on American Activities and
Speaker 1: other early first generation Red hunters in America. Many of
Speaker 1: the people who we actually had names of were people
Speaker 1: who no longer worked for the State Department, or who
Speaker 1: had had a sister or a brother in law, or
Speaker 1: their own association with left wing activities twenty years before.
Speaker 1: They were not Flaming spies. Most of the twenty four
Speaker 1: Carrot spies had been rooted out long before Joe McCarthy
Speaker 1: joined the hunt, most of the ones. When we got
Speaker 1: to see the Russian archives, most of the spies who
Speaker 1: were still there, Joe McCarthy wouldn't have recognized if he
Speaker 1: had tripped over them in the dark on the way
Speaker 1: to his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. But what happened
Speaker 1: two days after his speech was he was on page
Speaker 1: one of every newspaper in America. He had the Truman
Speaker 1: administration on the defensive, and he never turned back. That
Speaker 1: was the moment where he realized this was the issue
Speaker 1: that was going to bring him the limelight. And if
Speaker 1: there was a moment where McCarthy ism was given birth,
Speaker 1: it was in front of that audience of mine operators
Speaker 1: and whoever else was there that night who didn't recognize
Speaker 1: what was going on and didn't recognize for sure that
Speaker 1: a crusade like we had not seen in a long
Speaker 1: time in America was being born. You mentioned, who knows
Speaker 1: what those papers were in his hand, Maybe they were
Speaker 1: race sheets. I should mention that actually Joe McCarthy was
Speaker 1: a gambler. He he liked to bet, He bet in
Speaker 1: all kinds of ways, and and that's just important to
Speaker 1: keep in mind. Well clearly that that night he bet
Speaker 1: on himself and uh and one and the thrill of
Speaker 1: the wind, whether we're talking about horse races or his
Speaker 1: individual political races or you know, political moments, the reward
Speaker 1: of that was addictive. I'm gonna I'm gonna say addictive
Speaker 1: for Joe McCarthy. He had Um. You know, some people
Speaker 1: from a neuro lot and from a neurological point of view,
Speaker 1: are more susceptible to addiction than others. There is something
Speaker 1: about their dopamine, the neurotransmitter dopamine of reward, that reward
Speaker 1: system that is primed to take off and super reward.
Speaker 1: Whether it's a gambling win, whether it's with substance use
Speaker 1: and addiction to alcohol or drugs, or whether even it's
Speaker 1: something like a political win. But the thing that gives
Speaker 1: you that dopamine high is just irresistible. And that seemed
Speaker 1: to be a really important feature that we see in
Speaker 1: many different ways, the ways in which he was I'll
Speaker 1: almost say a slave to his dopamine system, um, and
Speaker 1: how that drove a lot of behaviors for him. But
Speaker 1: upon this win this night, as you said, there was
Speaker 1: no turning back. And it's interesting because from a concrete
Speaker 1: point of view, you know, is there any evidence that
Speaker 1: he wanted to be president, that he wanted to and
Speaker 1: of the words move into into that position of power
Speaker 1: or what was the end goal? So there was no
Speaker 1: end goal, and that to me is one of the
Speaker 1: fascinating things and it is reminiscent of what we see
Speaker 1: maybe going on today. That the goal was to get
Speaker 1: power and hold on to power. It was not what
Speaker 1: you would do with it, whether he ever wanted to
Speaker 1: be president. Every time he would deny it to one person,
Speaker 1: he tells somebody else he did. I saw a wonderful
Speaker 1: check that had never been cashed to the McCarthy for
Speaker 1: President committee in his um personal papers. But I want
Speaker 1: to just say one more thing about the addiction. You
Speaker 1: talked about it compellingly from a mental health point of view.
Speaker 1: I want to say that in later years, when McCarthy
Speaker 1: went after not just communists, but he went after gays
Speaker 1: and lesbians in government, he said that the reason he
Speaker 1: was doing that was because they're being closeted where their
Speaker 1: sexual orientation made them vulnerable to blackmail by Soviet operatives.
Speaker 1: I think Joe McCarthy's addictions made him vulnerable. His gambling
Speaker 1: addiction is what he was doing with his money, his
Speaker 1: alcohol consumption, all of those are things that made him
Speaker 1: more vulnerable than all the people he was targeting for
Speaker 1: their alleged vulnerabilities. And it is one more way where
Speaker 1: we see hypocrisy defining what he did. But that's another
Speaker 1: element I think of opportunism, well, hypocrisy, but what I
Speaker 1: would call projection, right, these things within himself. Um, I mean,
Speaker 1: he was the one being the bad guy, He was
Speaker 1: the one lying, He was the one destroying other people's lives,
Speaker 1: and he projected all of this out and including as
Speaker 1: you said, the addictions and the self destructive and and
Speaker 1: stigmatized behaviors that he was committing. All of this was
Speaker 1: projected out. It's I'm not the problem. Other people are
Speaker 1: the problem, right. Other people are the spies, the bad guys,
Speaker 1: the self destructive guys, the stigmatized guys, and and that
Speaker 1: was a huge part of his m O. I guess
Speaker 1: I'll say that he that he needed to project all
Speaker 1: these things outward and he but at the same time, sadly,
Speaker 1: for many other people in this country. Again, his moral
Speaker 1: compass didn't seem to make him sympathetic at all or
Speaker 1: empathetic at all in terms of destroying other people's lives.
Speaker 1: He was sympathetic and empathetic only when he was going
Speaker 1: out for the drink after he had destroyed them during
Speaker 1: the day, and when he was taking him out and
Speaker 1: being their buddy afterwards. He was a bit empathetic. But
Speaker 1: in terms of the randomness of this whole um launch
Speaker 1: of McCarthy is um, I want to just it is
Speaker 1: partly fatuous, but I also think it partly suggests how
Speaker 1: random the whole thing was. One of the many ways
Speaker 1: his numbers that first week kept changing between especially two
Speaker 1: numbers two communists or fifty seven, and the fifty seven,
Speaker 1: it was suggested, could have come he was a big
Speaker 1: Hamburger eater, and it suggested that he might have gone
Speaker 1: in and used Hines fifty seven sauce and that number
Speaker 1: stuck in his mind. And that wouldn't surprise me because
Speaker 1: the numbers didn't mean much of anything, and it could
Speaker 1: have come from anywhere. Let's take a quick break here.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment, bed bed bedding. It
Speaker 1: is important for people to understand it was not unusual
Speaker 1: will for him to have a multi drink lunch, um
Speaker 1: to show up on the floor after lunch appearing drunk,
Speaker 1: to show up the next day in the Senate appearing hungover,
Speaker 1: and um somewhere in this time period became this really
Speaker 1: unfathomable story that it seemed he was probably at some
Speaker 1: point started to use opiates. It may have started because
Speaker 1: he he was prescribed them for pain. He had a
Speaker 1: lot of accidents, he broke a bone or or something
Speaker 1: like that. Um it may have started because he had
Speaker 1: terrible hangovers the next day and was looking for some relief.
Speaker 1: But UM, the story of the secrecy of his addiction,
Speaker 1: the discovery by the head of the Federal Bureau of
Speaker 1: Narcotics and his the the Federal Bureau of Narcotics being
Speaker 1: convinced that they basically had to maintain his habit UH
Speaker 1: to somehow protect the world or protect his ongoing crusade
Speaker 1: against communism, provided him ongoing morphine via a Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: Pharmacy and the impact of that secret because you have
Speaker 1: to understand that if you think drug use and alcohol
Speaker 1: use or substance abuse is stigmatized today, which it is
Speaker 1: a deeply, deeply stigmatized and not understood really as an illness,
Speaker 1: the degree to which it was stigmatized in the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties is UH today pales in comparison. So I want
Speaker 1: to push back a little bit. So what you said
Speaker 1: about the morphine addiction, the opioid addiction UM was reported
Speaker 1: in the newspapers, and it was in an unnamed way
Speaker 1: by the guy who ran the drug agency, and Slinger
Speaker 1: was his name. UM. He indicated that there was an
Speaker 1: unnamed senior politician who this happened to, when everybody presumed
Speaker 1: and it may have been that he was referring to McCarthy.
Speaker 1: The pushback on that as I want to be fair
Speaker 1: to him. There's enough that we know about what he
Speaker 1: did that that would have shown up, I think given
Speaker 1: the way his alcohol addiction did in his exhaustive records,
Speaker 1: thousands of pages of records UM from Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Speaker 1: And I didn't trust who am I a an old
Speaker 1: health reporter to sit down and try to make sense
Speaker 1: of that and whether there was really any sign of
Speaker 1: addiction there. So I sat down with three doctors, one
Speaker 1: of whom had just stepped down as dean of Harvard Medical,
Speaker 1: A second was the editor in chief emeritus of New
Speaker 1: England Journal, and the third was an expert on a
Speaker 1: lot of the areas that McCarthy had suffered various medical woes.
Speaker 1: And we actually there were four doctors and we sat
Speaker 1: down and looked through every one of those pages, and
Speaker 1: there was no evidence in his medical records. That doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that he wasn't addicted, but it was no evidence
Speaker 1: of that addiction. There was a jolting and upsetting set
Speaker 1: of evidence of his alcohol addiction, and it was there
Speaker 1: at an early stage from the moment that he was
Speaker 1: condemned by his fellow senators. That alcohol consumption was quantified
Speaker 1: in the records. And the only surprise to me is
Speaker 1: that he lived as long as he did drinking that
Speaker 1: much in the later years. But one of the interesting
Speaker 1: things we now have access to all of the nine
Speaker 1: thousand pages of transcripts of McCarthy's closed door hearings, two
Speaker 1: thirds of his hearings were behind closed doors. He thought
Speaker 1: that they would never become public, and they showed Joe
Speaker 1: McCarthy unhinged when he thought nobody was watching. And one
Speaker 1: of the many interesting things to me in those hearings,
Speaker 1: it wasn't just how he abused the rights of witnesses
Speaker 1: and how somebody who appeared before him in a private
Speaker 1: closed door session that was used as a staging ground
Speaker 1: to see whether they wanted to bring him before the
Speaker 1: public and if they were too good a witness, meaning
Speaker 1: if they fought back effectively. They never showed up in
Speaker 1: the public hearings. It was only the ones that he
Speaker 1: knew that he could get the better of. But another thing,
Speaker 1: and it may be my looking for it, but I
Speaker 1: don't think so. His demeanor changed from the morning sessions,
Speaker 1: where I think he was sober, to the afternoon sessions,
Speaker 1: where his fuse became shorter. He gave longer diet tribes
Speaker 1: of speeches, and I think it was for two reasons.
Speaker 1: I think one, his standard lunch was a burger, a
Speaker 1: raw onion, and whiskey, and I think he had had
Speaker 1: enough whiskey at lunch that he lost his temper more
Speaker 1: quickly in the afternoon. But the other thing that I'm
Speaker 1: intrigued about from his medical records is he had hemorrhoids.
Speaker 1: And it may just have been if you sit for
Speaker 1: two hours, the hemorrhoids are controllable. You start looking nasty
Speaker 1: after four or five, have a six hours Okay, So
Speaker 1: that's interesting. Well, certainly chronic pain of any sort could
Speaker 1: definitely shorten your fuse, no question about it. And we
Speaker 1: have to wonder why he went from really being I
Speaker 1: guess we'd have to argue quite successful in his pursuits right,
Speaker 1: in his effect and in his acruement of power in
Speaker 1: terms of inflicting McCarthy ism on the on the nation
Speaker 1: to to ultimately creating his own downfall by going for
Speaker 1: the military, for going going at the army. And that
Speaker 1: seems like such a clear, uh self destructive maneuver, I guess,
Speaker 1: I'll say, or a very very poor decision that we
Speaker 1: have to wonder what what was instrumental in that decision
Speaker 1: for him that ultimately brought his downfall. So I think
Speaker 1: what happened to Joe McCarthy is he began his crisis
Speaker 1: sight of McCarthy is um with that accidental delivery of
Speaker 1: a speech that he never knew was going to take
Speaker 1: off in that way. And he knew in those early
Speaker 1: days when he was raising those charges that he was
Speaker 1: being an opportunist and that he didn't have to believe
Speaker 1: in the things. I think over time, something strange happened
Speaker 1: that he started to believe his own rhetoric in early
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four. By the time he took on the military,
Speaker 1: he had failed to see that he was overstepping that
Speaker 1: you could bully people in the State Department, you could
Speaker 1: get away with it at the Voice of America, you
Speaker 1: could get away with it in the government printing office
Speaker 1: because nobody particularly knew who those people were or cared
Speaker 1: much about them. But there was an institution in America
Speaker 1: that was too big to bully. That was the U. S. Army.
Speaker 1: That was also the moment when he did that, that
Speaker 1: not just the army eventually developed a backbone and taking
Speaker 1: him on, but our commander in chief, the one person
Speaker 1: in America more popular than Joe McCarthy, This former war
Speaker 1: hero Dwight Eisenhower, finally understood that the army was something
Speaker 1: he wasn't going to let McCarthy get away with bullying.
Speaker 1: He understood that McCarthy was overstepping, and Joe McCarthy went
Speaker 1: one step further. Had he not done that, he could
Speaker 1: have gone on for years. But I also think what happened.
Speaker 1: We look at his poll numbers and when he took
Speaker 1: on the Army, the U. S. Senate, his old sub
Speaker 1: committee ended up running what was the most famous set
Speaker 1: of hearings ever run. They were called the Army McCarthy Hearings.
Speaker 1: At the start of those hearings, Joe McCarthy was at
Speaker 1: a full fifty percent popularity. The gallop Poles said one
Speaker 1: in every two Americans thought he was doing a great job.
Speaker 1: By the end of those hearings in the summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four, his numbers had gone from fifty down
Speaker 1: to thirty. And anybody who's old enough to member those
Speaker 1: hearings remembers one magical moment where a very smart, Harvard
Speaker 1: trained lawyer from Boston named Joe Welch stood up and
Speaker 1: said when McCarthy went after Welch's young associate and said
Speaker 1: that he had been affiliated with a left wing legal group,
Speaker 1: Joe Welch famously said, Senator, have you no decency? Well,
Speaker 1: the truth is that was not the magical moment, and
Speaker 1: the truth is Joe Welch had been waiting during the
Speaker 1: entire hearings. He was a performer as well as a lawyer.
Speaker 1: He had concocted that line and he was waiting for
Speaker 1: a magical moment to deliver it. He picked a great moment.
Speaker 1: But the moment only worked because I think Americans had
Speaker 1: been watching this guy, who they thought was their hero,
Speaker 1: look more like the schoolyard bully on public television, and
Speaker 1: they wanted to ask, Senator, have you no decency? And
Speaker 1: so that line crystallized the question America had on its mind.
Speaker 1: It showed the power of television to take a guy
Speaker 1: who was a schoolyard bully and make him look that
Speaker 1: way to the American public. And my book begins with
Speaker 1: the line, this is a book about America's love affair
Speaker 1: with bullies. But I also think that American knows when
Speaker 1: a bully is really going too far and it will
Speaker 1: part company. So I wrote a book in part about
Speaker 1: one of the darkest chapters in American history. But I
Speaker 1: think there is ultimately a very uplifting message of this
Speaker 1: book and the book. The message is in American history
Speaker 1: with our uniquely American strain of demagogues, from Huey Long
Speaker 1: and the Jew baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coglin to
Speaker 1: Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. The lesson is that give
Speaker 1: a demagogue enough rope and they will hang themselves. And
Speaker 1: is part of the hanging that the overreach for power,
Speaker 1: the displaying who you really are inside, and people finally
Speaker 1: being able to grasp that. What what is the lesson
Speaker 1: that we can we can learn today about ultimately? You know,
Speaker 1: is it the doer or the dewey that ultimately catches
Speaker 1: on to the demagoguery. Great question, It's both. I believe
Speaker 1: two things about the American people. I believe we are
Speaker 1: more naive and susceptible to bullying into demagoguery than we
Speaker 1: think about ourselves, because we've shown it repeatedly, you know,
Speaker 1: George Wallace, the lots of people who we've bought into.
Speaker 1: But I think in the end it is partly demagogues
Speaker 1: doing themselves in and it's partly America coming to its senses.
Speaker 1: And I believe and I pray that throughout every phase
Speaker 1: of history, including today, that in the Americans recognize bullies.
Speaker 1: And I think that we saw the first effective pushback
Speaker 1: against some of the bullying that Donald Trump does come
Speaker 1: from the US military. It came from when he did
Speaker 1: over the last month things staging um, the photo opportunity
Speaker 1: outside the White House, across the street from the park
Speaker 1: and clearing people so we had a path to get there. UM.
Speaker 1: The commanders in chief of the various arms services, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: the heads of the various armed services, UM, Defense secretaries, UM,
Speaker 1: the heads of joint chiefs of staff passed in present.
Speaker 1: When the military is bullied, they stand up and say
Speaker 1: that institution you can't touch. And I think that I
Speaker 1: think Donald Trump is a very smart politician, and he
Speaker 1: probably learned a lesson there. But I also think that
Speaker 1: he has almost to the letter, followed the Joe McCarthy
Speaker 1: playbook in the last three and a half years. And
Speaker 1: it is not a playbook that I'm as an author
Speaker 1: writing about Joe McCarthy, and I say, jeez, he's using
Speaker 1: that playbook because I want to sell books. Um, nobody
Speaker 1: minds selling books. But it's also a playbook that had
Speaker 1: a flesh and blood through line in the name of
Speaker 1: a smart, arrogant lawyer named Roy Cone, who was Joe
Speaker 1: McCarthy's protege and Donald Trump's tutor, and he showed Trump
Speaker 1: all the things that a politician can learn from a
Speaker 1: guy like Joe McCarthy. And Trump was a very able student.
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break here. We'll be back in
Speaker 1: a moment. Be beddy, beddy, beddy. It certainly was Joe
Speaker 1: McCarthy's end, so to speak. Senate did go on to
Speaker 1: censure him. Um, he did lose his power. He became
Speaker 1: sort of a nonentity at that point. He did marry.
Speaker 1: He married actually this she was his assistant essentially, and
Speaker 1: uh and his teammate and very involved in supporting his work, um,
Speaker 1: supporting his ideology, and as you point out, kept his
Speaker 1: letters and all the records and everything was part of
Speaker 1: keeping those private following his death to protect I suspect
Speaker 1: his reputation. She was highly invested, but it wasn't. It
Speaker 1: was only I guess a couple of years after the
Speaker 1: incident that you described where he is, and then he
Speaker 1: has censured that he he becomes increasingly ill, he's hospitalized
Speaker 1: more often. It seems like a little of this and
Speaker 1: a little of that. No one's ever clear on a
Speaker 1: exactly what it is, but um, he is all. He
Speaker 1: dies in at the age of forty eight, really quite young.
Speaker 1: But um, the doctors say it's hepatitis, a non infectious
Speaker 1: hepatitis of undetermined ideology. And that's fascinating because of course
Speaker 1: it seems very clear from all the medical records that
Speaker 1: it is alcoholic hepatitis. And it's fascinating that even at
Speaker 1: that time, given the stigma, there's this effort to hide
Speaker 1: what he dies from. So appatitis was part of what
Speaker 1: was induced by his alcoholism, but that's not the part
Speaker 1: of the alcoholism that killed him, and the doctors had
Speaker 1: to have been it was only Um. It wasn't that
Speaker 1: long ago. It was the nineteen fifties, and they understood
Speaker 1: alcoholism and the effects, and they understood what was happening
Speaker 1: to him. And I think there were two reasons that
Speaker 1: they told a fib about what he died of. That
Speaker 1: the coroner listed acute hepatitis rather than alcoholism is the
Speaker 1: cause of death, and that the press repeated that, and
Speaker 1: that that's what's gone down in history. And I think
Speaker 1: one reason was because they were trying to protect Um,
Speaker 1: the family, But I think that UM and alcoholism they
Speaker 1: thought as being an embarrassment. I think the other reason
Speaker 1: was what you said that Um, it was the ultimate
Speaker 1: stigma then and maybe now, to die of an addiction,
Speaker 1: to die of something that it looks like people could
Speaker 1: turn and say, geez, he did that to himself, rather
Speaker 1: than he had a real disease, and alcoholism was a
Speaker 1: legitimate disease as we know today. But I'm not sure
Speaker 1: that if a politician died of what Joe McCarthy did
Speaker 1: today that would be any more candid. And it, to
Speaker 1: me was one of the many tragedies of his life
Speaker 1: that this guy who, in Bobby Kennedy's words, had been
Speaker 1: taken at a toboggan to the top the hill, was
Speaker 1: going blind down the hill, and he was so excited
Speaker 1: by the ride that the fact he was going to
Speaker 1: crash and hurt himself at the bottom, I think never
Speaker 1: occurred to him. From the day that he was censured
Speaker 1: by the Senate, his political life was over, and I
Speaker 1: would argue that his life generally was over. The only
Speaker 1: good things he had in his life really from that
Speaker 1: time on were an incredibly smart and loyal wife, Jane,
Speaker 1: and an infant daughter that they adopted at the very end.
Speaker 1: And it was too late, and it was too late
Speaker 1: to pull him out of what I think may have
Speaker 1: been a depression. Um. I think if he had any condition,
Speaker 1: any diagnosable condition, and I'm no psychiatrists, um it may
Speaker 1: have been a bipolar disease or what they call then
Speaker 1: manic depression, because he had such Mannock highs and he
Speaker 1: had such extraordinary lows, and it looked a bit classic
Speaker 1: like that, But there were very few highs after his
Speaker 1: censure by this in it at the end of nineteen
Speaker 1: four and it was really sad what happened to him,
Speaker 1: and we had it documented in a way that I'm
Speaker 1: not sure, anybody, even public figures like McCarthy, had the
Speaker 1: last two days of his life documented. There was a
Speaker 1: medical orderly sitting with him, taking down every rant and
Speaker 1: rave that McCarthy uttered, taking down every word. His nurse
Speaker 1: or doctor said, so when we come along all this
Speaker 1: time later, And there were all these conspiracy theories that
Speaker 1: Joe McCarthy was murdered, that he died of some fantastic cause. Well,
Speaker 1: unless that orderly was lying about everything that happened in
Speaker 1: those last two days, he didn't die of any conspiracy.
Speaker 1: He died of something hugely tragic, which was the d
Speaker 1: T S and alcohol poisoning and a fever that spiked too.
Speaker 1: I think it was a hundred and seven. And we
Speaker 1: know that you bring up bipolar disorder, and of course
Speaker 1: all these things were saying, you know, it's impossible, even
Speaker 1: though I am a psychiatrist at a psychoanalyst, for me
Speaker 1: to diagnose someone I've never met and based only on
Speaker 1: retrospective information. But one would expect that if you did
Speaker 1: have bipolar disorder, first of all, the hypomania romania might
Speaker 1: put you in a position to be exactly the kind
Speaker 1: of expansive thinker and grandiose character and highly creative and
Speaker 1: verbal verbally able person that Joe McCarthy by all accounts appeared.
Speaker 1: But we don't have documented periods of inability to function
Speaker 1: at least until the very end there, you know, after
Speaker 1: he was censured, but earlier in his life. There there
Speaker 1: are no reported periods of a deep depression such that
Speaker 1: one's functionality is impaired and one basically can't get out
Speaker 1: of bed and you know, really performed that he seems
Speaker 1: to be much more on the side of driven uh
Speaker 1: and and and doing that being said, um, there there
Speaker 1: are people who have bipolar disorder who have very little
Speaker 1: in the way of depression, much more in the in
Speaker 1: the vein of hypomania and mania. Um. But I would
Speaker 1: have to tell you that if you saw someone like
Speaker 1: this today in your office, it would be impossible to
Speaker 1: really make an accurate diagnosis until you had treated their
Speaker 1: substance abuse, because unfortunately, the substance abuse can make people
Speaker 1: appear all of those hypomanic things you know, grandiose, aid
Speaker 1: able and um and also depressed, because the reality is
Speaker 1: alcohol is a depressant and it actually makes many people
Speaker 1: feel both disinhibited in terms of their verbal capacities and
Speaker 1: so on, but also feel at times in terms of
Speaker 1: their mood, very depressed or fluctuating in mood. And so
Speaker 1: it's it's very hard to separate those things. And yet
Speaker 1: there's tremendous what we call comorbidity. Right, people who experience
Speaker 1: one are very likely to experience the other. If you
Speaker 1: are bipolar, you're probably more likely to unfortunately suffer from
Speaker 1: substance addiction, UM or any other mood disorder or I
Speaker 1: guess we could also argue in the case of Joe McCarthy,
Speaker 1: you know how much of this was a potential personality
Speaker 1: disorder in other words, that characterologically all along there were
Speaker 1: patterns of behavior that were that worked for him in
Speaker 1: certain ways but really didn't in others, and particularly anti
Speaker 1: social characteristics. A man who enjoyed breaking the rules, I mean,
Speaker 1: he liked taking risks, he liked breaking the rules. He
Speaker 1: seemed to be devoid of empathy for others, truly if
Speaker 1: they making them suffer was not something that pained him.
Speaker 1: UM and these sort of You know, if he didn't
Speaker 1: happen to have gone into government where he could be
Speaker 1: spared the punishments. He is somebody who if he'd gone
Speaker 1: into different directions, might have found himself really on the
Speaker 1: wrong side of the law and often punished. The only
Speaker 1: place I would take exception to what you said is
Speaker 1: he did find himself from the wrong side of the law,
Speaker 1: but he was protected because he was in the Senate,
Speaker 1: and he did. I think that he liabeled lots of people.
Speaker 1: He did all kinds of things. There was a hint
Speaker 1: in the medical records from his time in the military
Speaker 1: that when he went into the medical facilities in the
Speaker 1: South Pacific, that doctors wrote different things. And I don't
Speaker 1: know whether they were being coy in not being more explicit,
Speaker 1: or they didn't know or what it was, but they
Speaker 1: suggested maybe he's um suffering from some sort of serious
Speaker 1: depression or fatigue, or maybe he's just lazy and doesn't
Speaker 1: want to go back out. But there was a hint
Speaker 1: that something was going on. But I think that probably
Speaker 1: if there was anything they would have kept out of
Speaker 1: the medical records, it was um a stigmatized yes depression
Speaker 1: or any mental illness. And I wish that I could
Speaker 1: have interviewed his doctors from back in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: because I think they knew more than they were letting on.
Speaker 1: They were extraordinarily explicit about everything, um in terms of
Speaker 1: his physical symptoms and the just hinting at things in
Speaker 1: terms of mental issues. I think some of the clear
Speaker 1: sense I had of what motivated him was an unpublished
Speaker 1: memoir that his wife Jean wrote, called The Joe McCarthy.
Speaker 1: I knew she never published it for understandable reasons why
Speaker 1: she left it behind in his papers. I think what
Speaker 1: happens to people when they leave hundreds or thousands of
Speaker 1: boxes of papers is nobody has the energy to go
Speaker 1: through and see what's there and what's not, and they
Speaker 1: throw it all there and say we're putting it into
Speaker 1: an archives and nobody's going to see it for a
Speaker 1: very long time. And I think some of the greatest
Speaker 1: insights into who Joe McCarthy was were not his insights,
Speaker 1: because I don't think he was the kind of guy
Speaker 1: who would ever sit down and offer any really candid
Speaker 1: sense of himself. But she just in observing who he was,
Speaker 1: even though she adored him. Um, she was smarter than
Speaker 1: he was, as smart as I think he was. Um,
Speaker 1: she was his biggest booster. She was a true, true
Speaker 1: believer in the cause of McCarthy ism um, which they
Speaker 1: would have defined as patriotism and all Americanism. Joe McCarthy
Speaker 1: never objected to the term McCarthy ism, He just offered
Speaker 1: his own definition for it. But in the end, um,
Speaker 1: we are grateful to them because they left behind such
Speaker 1: a record of who he was and what he did
Speaker 1: and why he mattered and he mattered. There was a
Speaker 1: reason my book had a one word title of demagogue,
Speaker 1: and that is because while this is a biography of
Speaker 1: Joe McCarthy, it is also a biography of this strain
Speaker 1: of bullying that didn't end with him and didn't begin
Speaker 1: with him, But we can use his life as a
Speaker 1: way of understanding and battling back against it. And I
Speaker 1: would add to that, there's a concept in my field
Speaker 1: called folliado, the delusion of two, and sometimes we see
Speaker 1: that literally in individuals. Two people come together and they're
Speaker 1: in this delusional world that no one else can understand
Speaker 1: because it's not real, it's psychotic, and but they both
Speaker 1: believe it and they share this delusion. In Joe McCarthy's time,
Speaker 1: he created this belief system right between himself and the
Speaker 1: public at large, and they both had to buy into
Speaker 1: it for him to continue the delusion, if you will,
Speaker 1: or the belief system that he had going his own
Speaker 1: McCarthy ism. When one person breaks out of that, it
Speaker 1: ends the folia due essentially, And so can we learn
Speaker 1: from that historically that that can occur, that that a
Speaker 1: that a person can propagate a belief system that a
Speaker 1: whole community can buy into, even if it's not accurate,
Speaker 1: even if it's not correct. And I hope that we
Speaker 1: all can learn that somebody who can gain that kind
Speaker 1: of charismatic power of a cult leader of sorts uh,
Speaker 1: can can propagate some really delusional thoughts that we can
Speaker 1: all buy into. So I love that idea that they
Speaker 1: propagate the thoughts, but that becomes scarier still when there
Speaker 1: are two of them doing it and they're reinforcing one another.
Speaker 1: And there was a very smart physicist from Harvard named
Speaker 1: Ramsey who McCarthy invited to his house. Ramsey had been
Speaker 1: on meet the Press, I think it was, and it
Speaker 1: had been trying to take on um some of the
Speaker 1: things that McCarthy had said in one of his hearings
Speaker 1: and was being try by the press, and McCarthy felt
Speaker 1: badly enough for him that he and his wife invited
Speaker 1: Ramsey to come to a dinner party that night at
Speaker 1: his house. And Ramsey was a smart guy who would
Speaker 1: go on to win a Nobel Prize in physics. And
Speaker 1: Ramsey said, at the end of that night, Joe McCarthy
Speaker 1: alone didn't scare me. He was not dangerous. But when
Speaker 1: you added Jean McCarthy, this incredibly smart, incredibly reinforcing person,
Speaker 1: sort of taking all of his worst instincts and feeding
Speaker 1: it back, that really scared me. And that could have
Speaker 1: become a dictatorship. And I would suggest that there was
Speaker 1: another duo in the McCarthy era that did the same
Speaker 1: thing before Jean, or during the time the gene was
Speaker 1: there doing it at home, there was a guy, Roy Cone,
Speaker 1: who we talked about, who was doing it at work.
Speaker 1: And Roy Kone was exceedingly smart, exceedingly arrogant, a moral
Speaker 1: and he also encouraged all the worst instincts in Joe McCarthy.
Speaker 1: And I want to just say one last thing about that,
Speaker 1: which is, if roy Cone hadn't gotten the job as
Speaker 1: chief council, which really meant chief of staff, the second
Speaker 1: in line for that job was a guy named Bobby Kennedy.
Speaker 1: And what would Joe McCarthy have been like? And we
Speaker 1: can only imagine if it had been Bobby Kennedy there
Speaker 1: instead of Roy Cohne helping set the path on where
Speaker 1: Joe McCarthy was going. Well, sadly we will we will
Speaker 1: never know, but it is important for us to think
Speaker 1: about today. Who are the duos? Who do we give
Speaker 1: our power to? Right? Who do we give over to
Speaker 1: and and thereby join their their system, join their belief system. Well,
Speaker 1: that wraps things up for this episode. Thanks for joining
Speaker 1: me today. If you're interested in more information about Joe McCarthy,
Speaker 1: check out Larry Tis book Demagogue, or for more on
Speaker 1: the concepts of personology, you can also check out my
Speaker 1: book The Power of Different The Link between Disorder and
Speaker 1: Genie Us. Also make sure to follow me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at doctor Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy m D Until
Speaker 1: next time. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: The executive producers are Doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The Associate producer is
Speaker 1: Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.