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On the other hand, a larger share of responsibility for the confusion of McCarthyism belongs to those Republican leaders who have either openly encouraged McCarthy or failed to disavow him, in the belief that he was making votes. Republican Senate Leader Kenneth Wherry recently declared that McCarthy had done the U.S. a "great service." Even Ohio's Robert A. Taft came to McCarthy's defense when Truman described Joe as "a Kremlin asset."
In less McCarthyesque language, McCarthy can be summed up this way:
1) His antics foul up the necessary examination of the past mistakes of the Truman-Acheson foreign policy.
2) His constant imputation of treason distracts attention from the fact that patriotic men can make calamitous mistakes for which they should be held politically accountable.
3) There are never any circumstances which justify the reckless imputation of treason or other moral guilt to individuals in or out of office.
4) McCarthy's success in smearing Tydings and others generates fear of the consequences of dissent. This fear is exaggerated by the "liberals" who welcome McCarthyism as an issue; but the fear exists—and it is poison in a democracy.
Two Kinds of Bad Sentries. More than Joe McCarthy went into the making of McCarthyism. It would never have become a force if mistakes of policy had not led the U.S. into a position that alarmed the public. Long before McCarthy, the U.S. had been slipping into the lazy fallacy that all ideas, policies and political systems are approximately equal—a state of mind very different from the valid principle that all men have a right to express their ideas, however bad. Part of the U.S. public, overtolerant of bad ideas, was a sucker for McCarthy's bigoted effort to prove that bad policy must be the work of evil, traitorous men.
In the vital debates of the day, this charge is totally irrelevant. But it is an irrelevance that compels attention. Like a man busily shooting off firecrackers in a legislative hall, McCarthy may not be persuasive, but he must be dealt with before any debate at all can progress.
Some of the sentries of the republic were asleep after the war—and some are still drowsy. The finding that they were not traitors does not answer the charge that they were bad sentries.
And the drowsy sentry is no worse sentry than the one who maliciously cries wolf, shoots up the coconut trees, and keeps the camp in a state of alarm and confusion.