Because one easily can, and because one probably should, let us today draw a line connecting Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump.
I make that statement bearing in mind that invoking McCarthyism always should be treated as suspect. It risks trivializing the sins of the Wisconsin demagogue's sinister attacks on "un-American activities." It invites a charge of hyperbolic smear.
But if the line is straight, direct, logical and easily followed--and if it reveals tactics by the current American president at all reminiscent of a shameful rogue senator--then one ought to draw the line and let people consider it.
So, to begin: In 1954, through his special committee conducting hearings into supposed anti-American communist activities prominently inside the country, McCarthy ended up going after the United States Army.
His committee chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had become angry at the Army because his attempt to get the Army to give preferential treatment to a private who was a friend of Cohn and aide to McCarthy's committee had been spurned. So, McCarthy--with Cohn at his side--charged that the Army was retaliating for the committee's investigation into supposed lax Army security that permitted communist infiltration.
The matter reached its dramatic peak at a hearing in which McCarthy was alleging communist ties by a lawyer aide of Joseph Welch, a Boston attorney the Army had hired for the proceeding. That led Welch to ask famously: "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"
It was the beginning of the end for McCarthy and McCarthyism. Going after the U.S. military confirmed his downfall.
So, to draw the line: Cohn, McCarthy's right-hand legal adviser, went on to a scandal-checkered career in New York City, during which he worked for a time as a lawyer for real estate mogul Donald Trump.
He trained Trump in his method of never admitting a mistake, staying on the attack and always claiming victory in the press--lessons Trump seems clearly to have applied for a lifetime, up to and including his preposterous infestation of the U.S. presidency.
"Where is my Roy Cohn?" Trump is said to have despaired as president. Jeff Sessions, for example, had let him down by treating the Justice Department as a public-responsibility agency, not Trump's personal law firm, and recusing himself from matters involving the special counsel investigation into Trump's alleged Russian ties.
Cohn is long deceased, but his mantras prevail still with Trump and his staunchest defenders, a few of whom have appeared lately on cable television programs essentially alleging double-agent espionage by a lieutenant colonel in the Army.
This supposedly wicked rascal works on Ukraine issues for the National Security Council in the White House and is a decorated veteran of the war in Iraq, during which he was injured by an IED.
It happens that the officer, Alexander Vindman, is Soviet-born. His family fled to Ukraine and then, when he was 3, came to the United States.
Vindman is now Army-trained and Harvard-educated and cleared for service at the highest level as a Ukraine specialist for the NSC with a West Wing office.
In that role, Vindman listened to Trump's phone conversation with the Ukraine president in which Trump plainly wanted Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden before it would receive congressionally authorized military aid.
Vindman was alarmed by the call, believing it a threat to American-Ukraine relations in that it would taint those relations with the American domestic partisan political divide. Vindman complained to higher NSC officials and others, and, on Tuesday, testified on those subjects before the House committees conducting the impeachment inquiry.
Trump allies in the media and the right-wing commentariat suggested in public pronouncements that, at the least, Vindman has conflicted sentiments, owing to his Ukrainian background. One Trumpian even said some people would call what Vindman was doing--as a supposed Ukrainian sympathizer infiltrating the White House--"espionage" against America.
If Cohn and McCarthy didn't like you, then you were un-American. If Cohn-trained Trump doesn't like you, then you must not be full-bore American. You see.
We might be so lucky as to see Trumpism brought down by the same overplay that cemented McCarthyism's demise.
Alas, the contemporary United States political climate may prove more tolerant of smears against the nation's brave warriors than was the case in the early post-World War II period of 1954.
McCarthy wasn't a Republican president in a position to nominate Republican judges and advance Republican policies. McCarthy had become a burden to most Republicans, actually, whereas Trump, owing to his support from the conservative base, strikes modern-day Republican office-holders as vital to their continued political viability.
Nonetheless, it has become ever clearer that we will now proceed toward impeachment of Trump by the Democratic House in November and a failure to convict by the Republican Senate in December.
Then in 11 months or so after that we'll vote on whether Trumpism is too much like McCarthyism, or whether we still care.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/31/2019