Volume 16, Number 4 · March 11, 1971
Truman and the Beast
By Murray Kempton
The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate
by Robert Griffith
University of Kentucky, 362 pp., $8.50
The Politics of Loyalty: The White House and the Communist Issue, 1946-1952
by Alan D. Harper
Greenwood, 318 pp., $13.00
Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism
by Athan Theoharis
Quadrangle, 256 pp., $6.95
Herbert Butterfield noticed in the early Charles James Fox an uncontrollable itch to add 'the final strokes to the argument of his friends, as though determined to drive the whole logic of the situation to a further extreme—to go one note higher than the top note of the piano.'[1] This observation seems unjust to Fox, whose life is our best argument for the social uses of demagoguery; but it does perfectly describe Joseph R. McCarthy, our strongest recent argument against them.
Review, 6102 words
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