The headline of Jonathan Zimmerman’s article in the Washington Post, “How Trump finally turned Republicans against McCarthyism,” alerted me to the possibility that Zimmerman has never spoken to a Republican in the wild.
The subhead, “After nearly 70 years, Republicans have stopped defending Joe McCarthy,” confirmed my suspicions. Zimmerman insists that the “new consensus” among Republicans is that “McCarthyism was, in fact, a massive, unpardonable assault on freedom, fairness and the rule of law.” This is nuts. In reality, McCarthy’s status among Republicans is higher now than it has been since his untimely death in 1957.
According to Zimmerman, President Trump “fired the first salvo” last summer when he compared the Mueller investigation to “an illegal Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt.” For all his virtues, Donald Trump may be the least typical Republican in America. To further substantiate his claim, Zimmerman cites “two GOP congressional leaders,” neither of whom he names or quotes, as having made a similar comparison.
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The evidence that Zimmerman musters to show that support for McCarthy was strong until recently is, if possible, more feeble than his evidence for a new anti-McCarthy consensus. In fact, it is so embarrassingly feeble that it further damages the Post’s increasingly shaky reputation.
In the 1960s, for instance, Zimmerman claims, “Republicans stepped up their hero worship of McCarthy.” To support this claim, he quotes an obscure congressman telling a Republican gathering, “You and I are going to have to carry on the work of the great Sen. McCarthy.”
What Zimmerman does not say is that Rep. Kenneth J. Merkel was speaking to a group of “friends and admirers” of McCarthy on the tenth anniversary of the senator’s death in McCarthy’s native Wisconsin, more specifically in Appleton, Wisconsin, the home of the John Birch society. If Pulitzer gave out prizes for cherry-picking quotes, Zimmerman would be a contender.
To his humble credit, Zimmerman traces a 1975 quote in defense of McCarthy to a “gravesite commemoration,” once again back in Appleton. As to the person doing the commemorating, Zimmerman tells us only that he is a “GOP speaker.” A GOP speaker? That’s it? I could find the quote nowhere but in his article.
In sum, Zimmerman uses two graveside quotes from obscure speakers, one unnamed, to represent the Republicans’ “stepped up … hero worship” for McCarthy in the 1960s and 1970s. Zimmerman, by the way, is co-author of a book titled The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools. One can only imagine.
