This is from an article by Harvey Klehr on FrontPageMag with the title, “Setting the Record on Joe McCarthy Straight”.

But if McCarthy was right about some of the large issues, he was wildly wrong on virtually all of the details.

There is no indication that he had even a hint of the Venona decryptions, so he did not base his accusations on the information in them. Indeed, virtually none of the people that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Soviet agents turn up in Venona. He did identify a few small fry who we now know were spies but only a few. And there is little evidence that those he fingered were among the unidentified spies of Venona.

Many of his claims were wildly inaccurate; his charges filled with errors of fact, misjudgments of organizations and innuendoes disguised as evidence.

He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies — distinctions that were important to make.

The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. He remains a demagogue, whose wild charges actually made the fight against Communist subversion more difficult.

Like Gresham’s Law, McCarthy’s allegations marginalized the accurate claims. Because his facts were so often wrong, real spies were able to hide behind the cover of being one of his victims and even persuade well-meaning but naïve people that the whole anti-communist cause was based on inaccuracies and hysteria.

So who else was carrying the anti-communist cause at the time? Where are these wild inaccuracies? Just yesterday I was reading a book co-authored by Klehr* and I opened it at random onto a section dealing with Owen Lattimore who is treated as a possible Soviet agent but over whom judgment must be suspended. But see Blacklisted by History Chapter 29 and elsewhere. Seventy years later Klehr (and Haynes) can’t make up their minds. McCarthy was there, then, right on the spot, trying as best he could surrounded by enemies out to destroy his reputation. There may be a strategic sense in attacking McCarthy today although I barely see it and don’t accept it. But if Lattimore in their minds is a 50-50 or less, then who can really be a certainty unless they confess in open court? But let’s take this one para from the above quotation to see what we find:

He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies — distinctions that were important to make.

Let me see. McCarthy is trying to sort out all of this in real time on his own and didn’t quite make all the fine distinctions we still cannot make three generations later. If Klehr is still not willing to point the finger at Lattimore because we cannot be absolutely positively sure, then what was McCarthy supposed to do? He wasn’t writing some useless scholarly tract. He was trying to help save the West from communist tyranny. And it wasn’t the US that was directly endangered but large parts of Asia and Europe. But if the US was going to carry this fight, it had to first know it was in a fight. This kind of refined sorting things out seventy years later is supposedly “right-wing” political writing at its worst. And the thing is, what’s the issue if people like me think back on McCarthy in a positive way?

I could see an argument that says you don’t want to get caught up in any of this since the McCarthy name remains a stick to beat you with. If the argument went that this is one sleeping dog that should be left to lie, then I could acknowledge that there are genuine dangers in bringing McCarthy up. But that does not seem to be the point. The criticisms are about McCarthy, what he did and how he did it that for all I can see could easily be published in the Washington Post.

Well let me use the Deng Zhao Ping ratio of 70% good 30% bad since if that’s good enough for Mao it ought to be more than good enough for Joe McCarthy (how bout 90-10?). In my view, though, looking back but having watched the ways of the Left, the reason McCarthy became as notorious as he did was because he was so effective in what he did. I don’t know exactly what these McCarthyist tactics are supposed to mean, but if it means exposing the existence of evil doers in the State Department, I am all for it.

* John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. 2006. Early Cold War Spies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For the discussion on Owen Lattimore see Chapter 2 on Amerasia.