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All U.S. leadership tends to be confused with and contaminated by the conduct of Senator McCarthy. A large part of this identification can be credited to the fact that European democrats, inevitably thinking in terms of parliamentary government, have only the dimmest understanding of the U.S. separation of executive and legislative powers. Their lack of instruction is scarcely the fault of Senator McCarthy—or President Eisenhower—but the effect is not mitigated by this. The effect is that the President and the anti-McCarthy Republicans quite often seem to horrified European onlookers like rabbits transfixed by the headlights of an onrushing truck.
The very fact that what is called "McCarthyism" is a rather elusive blur gives it a capacity to suffuse a whole national policy. As one U.S. diplomat describes it: "It is a kind of smog, discoloring all our purposes. In the thousand little things that go to make up diplomatic success or failure, it just suffices to keep the U.S. from getting the benefit of the doubt in the minds of so many. And serious decisions that often in history look so solid really amount to just that—winning the benefit of the doubt."
The public performance and fame of Senator McCarthy have succeeded, as has nothing else in modern U.S. history, in laying U.S. national behavior open to the most ludicrous caricature. Into the deadly struggle to turn back Communist aggression, to outsmart and outfight Communist parties threatening France and Italy, there suddenly seems to be injected a moment of farce, of hysteria edging on madness, when the news tickers of the world click out the report that Senator McCarthy is hot on the trail of a suspect typist trapped in the Pentagon labyrinth.
Of such unpleasant and often intangible stuff is fateful political decision made. This week, when Britain's Labor Party meets in its Scarborough conference, it faces a close and bitter division on the most urgent such decision before the West—the rearming of Germany. A Labor delegate, an advocate of German rearmament fighting fierce rank-and-file opposition, said on the eve of the conference: "Senator McCarthy may well decide this vote. All he stands for—all his identification with American policy in the eyes of average people—will force something between 500,000 and 1,000,000 votes to go against the direction in which America is trying to lead. That margin could be quite enough to decide the matter."
On the basis of such facts, a case can be made that few men in American politics have so valuably served the forces they professed to be bent on destroying. (The most obvious exception would be, of course, those American liberals who once elected to fight McCarthy, by denying the existence of Soviet espionage.)
A STAR-SPANGLED LINING
A fact which rarely occurs to us and almost certainly has never occurred to Senator McCarthy was pointed out to me by a veteran U.S. career diplomat, a man of wisdom and patience, who said: