Before then, however, still in the autumn of 1949, Truman was further damaged by the suggestions that his staff, although certainly not himself, were taking a few teaspoonsful out of that public trough. It was very minor stuff, centred around General Vaughan. He had done a few favours for gentlemen of mild dubiety of character who claimed that they could procure government contracts on a 5% basis, and had given the General one or two unsolicited but durable consumer goods. As a result the terms ‘Five Percenters’ and ‘Deep Freezers’ acquired the temporary status of catch-phrases which could be depended upon to send Republican audiences into paroxysms of derision and mirth. Truman reacted to this with his usual fierce, incautious loyalty. When Vaughan offered to resign he said ‘Don’t ever mention such a thing to me again. We came in here together and we’re going out of here together. Those so-and-sos are trying to get me, through you. I understand exactly what’s going on.’4
The wound to Truman at this stage was only a fairly light flesh one. But it paved the way to more damaging accusations a couple of years later. ‘Deep Freezers’ helped to create an atmosphere in which by 1952 ‘the mess in Washington’ was accepted as having an objective reality. The 1949 scandals were about as relevant to the record of the Truman administration as the equally petty Belcher scandal was to the achievement of the Attlee Government in Britain. The main difference was that while both were totally honest, Attlee was sharply censorious of pecadillos in others while Truman (if he liked them) was tolerant.
More serious in substance than these attacks was the solid refusal of the Southern conservative Democrats to vote for the Fair Deal. By the end of 1949 it was obvious that the President was not going to get any effective civil rights legislation, that Taft-Hartley was to remain unrepealed, that the Brennan Plan for agricultural support was not to be enacted, and that social security and education legislation had run into the sand. Almost the only enactment of a domestic plank of the 1948 platform was the National Housing Act. ‘I’ve kissed and petted more consarned [sic] S.O.B. so-called Democrats and left wing Republicans than all the Presidents put together. I have very few people fighting my battles in Congress as I fought FDR’s’5 he wrote in his diary on November 1st. However he consoled himself with the thought that he had got enough through on the international front that on balance things could be regarded as going ’fairly well’. And his daughter insists that throughout the first eighteen months of the second term, that is up to the outbreak of the Korean War, Truman was fairly content with life. She wrote in relation to this whole period that ‘Dad’s optimism soared’.1 Not even the first effusions of McCarthy in his ‘McCarthyite’ period, which began quite abruptly in February 1950, dimmed this ebullient mood.
McCarthy was a strange phenomenon. At the beginning of 1950 he was a forty-one-year-old small-town lawyer from Wisconsin who had got himself elected as a circuit judge in 1939, and then, in the Republican primary of 1946, after a period of war service in the Pacific, had defeated Robert M. La Follette, Jr, who had recently been voted in a poll of newspaper correspondents and political scientists ‘the best’ of the 96 senators. He had done so by a campaign of energy, calumny, indestructible bounce and massive (and mostly lying) direct mail advertising. After three rather tawdry years in the Senate, he was still looking for a satisfactory groin into which to put his knee. He had achieved little beyond that of reversing La Follette’s distinction and being voted ‘the worst’ Senator. Then he alighted, half by accident and half by a pervertedly inspired populist instinct, on the anti-Communist issue.
For its exploitation he had several unusual advantages. He half wanted to be liked, but he was quite indifferent to being respected. Truth or logic meant nothing to him. He could not be effectively caught out, because this is at least half a subjective state, and he was impervious to refutation. He simply moved on to the next unsupported accusation. He was argumentatively indestructible. What cast him down was the failure to attract attention, not the failure to convince. Even when he had no notable issue, he was good at the phrase which stuck, the scene which had to be reported.
As a result he quickly became a figure of world fame. In his own country his lowering features and rather flat, dispassionate voice became still more familiar than the sights and sounds of Truman, Eisenhower or Stevenson. He was the first demagogue of the television age, a poor speaker but the provider of compulsive viewing. In his five-year span of dreadful influence he weakened two presidents, but he was never himself even a remote prospect for the White House. He sapped other men’s leadership rather than promoted his own. His demagogy did not set the nation alight. It was too wheedling and his self-righteousness too shallow. He at least half knew that he was a fraud. His anti-Communism was more of a racket than a crusade. He once shared an elevator with Dean Acheson and greeted him with the off-duty false bonhomie of one travelling salesman in a line of doubtful goods to another in a different but similar line. This was a technique which often produced a friendly, almost grateful response from weak opponents. With Acheson it was less successful. The murderously cold silence and apoplectic forehead of the Secretary of State penetrated even to McCarthy. He was amoral rather than immoral. In the words of Richard Rovere, ‘though a demon himself, he was not a man possessed by demons’. As a result, when his spell was broken, he collapsed more quickly and completely than most of his victims. He passed into obscurity in 1954 and died less than three years later, still only 48, and probably as a result of a drinking bout instigated by bad news from his stockbroker. It was a death suited to neither a hero nor a fanatic. It did not even attract much attention.