It isn’t every junior Republican senator from Wisconsin who is accorded an “ism” after his name, but such was the case with Joe McCarthy, who ushered in “McCarthyism” this week (Feb. 9) in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia. There, McCarthy gave a speech in which he claimed that 205 members of the Communist Party worked in the State Department.  With that statement, “Tail Gunner Joe” (a nickname he gave himself while serving as an airman in WW II) took off on a flight that — when it crash landed four years later with McCarthy’s condemnation by the U.S. Senate — left a lot of human debris in its fiery wake.  During the McCarthy era he and his acolytes accused hundreds of innocent people of being Communists, which in many cases ruined their careers and destroyed their lives.

And McCarthyism was basically an accident.  Having spent an undistinguished four years in the Senate, McCarthy had been looking for an issue to run for re-election on in 1952, and anti-Communism seemed as good as any.  But when McCarthy began accusing Democrats of being “soft on Communism,” and “harboring Communists” within the government, he never dreamed he would give voice to a widely shared fear that in the uncertain post-war world America faced a grave threat from “the enemy within” — a phalanx of subversives sympathetic to, if not controlled by, the Communist Party.  It mattered little that McCarthy never proved his accusations, or that the number (and names) of these so-called Communist subversives changed almost daily.  What mattered was that Republicans had an issue with which to regain power, and to the extent that there actually were Communists in the government (and there were — lots of them, in fact), so much the better.

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It was said of Josef Stalin, the ruthless dictator of the Soviet Union during World War II and part of the Cold War, that he would have made a terrific poker player, as evidenced by the fact that, when he chose to, he could make his face a complete mask. One often cited example occurred in 1945 at an Allied war conference in Potsdam, Germany, when President Truman informed Stalin that the United States had successfully tested the world’s first atomic bomb.  Stalin showed no emotion. Indeed, he showed little interest in the news, which surprised Truman.

Actually, thanks to his spy network in the United State, Stalin already knew of America’s work on the atomic bomb. In fact, one of his spies, a German-born scientist named Klaus Fuchs, was part of the scientific team that had been assembled at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build it.  The information Fuchs passed to the Soviets on America’s atomic program even included a blueprint of the atomic bombs that were later dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Of course, Stalin was anything but disinterested in developing an atomic bomb, which he rightly saw as a way to join America as a military “superpower.”  He ordered his own top scientists to focus exclusively on developing a Soviet atomic bomb as quickly as possible, the result of which was the first successful explosion of a Soviet atomic bomb, this week (August 29) in 1949. Code-named “First Lightning,” its explosive power was equivalent to America’s first atomic explosion of five years earlier.

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This week (July 21) in 1949, the U.S. Senate authorized creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the most successful multi-national military alliance in history.  Sixty-two years later it is still in existence, and although increasingly its raison d’être is being questioned—the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Europe is practically nil—we should never forget its original purpose or its historic importance.

Travel back to Europe right after World War II. England is bankrupt, France and the Low Countries are prostrate, Italy is defeated, Germany is destroyed and cut in half (later becoming East and West Germany), and Eastern Europe is enveloped in an “Iron Curtain” of military control by the Soviet Union.  Most American and European leaders believe the Soviets will soon seek to control Western Europe as well.

Which they can do in one of two ways — internally, by supporting newly formed Communist parties, whose path to power will be paved by the poverty and breakdown of social order that exists in these post-war European nations. Or externally, by invading a defenseless Western Europe with the mighty Red Army.

To counter the internal threat, the Truman Administration developed the Marshall Plan — a plan to lend Western Europe billions of dollars to stabilize its economy and make it less susceptible to the (false) promises of Communism. But to counter the external threat, a military alliance was crucial — and one that must include the United States.

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