Senator Joseph McCarthy is the well-known instigator of the famous purge of the 1950's, The Red Scare. He went on a hunt for "security risks", or people belonging to the Communist party, Communist fronts, or fellow travellers who worked in posts in the American government. Starting in Wheeling, West Virginia, this youngest senator scared the American people by suggesting that President Harry S. Truman was protecting these Communist threats by an executive order which forbade federal employees from testifying about the activities and political leanings of their fellows.

This is the story of the former chicken farmer from Wisconsin who became infamous for trying to clean house in the U.S. government and instead, with the help of his rabid associate, Roy Cohn, frightened and imprisoned many innocent people. What started out with good intentions became a modern day Inquisition instead, backfiring on McCarthy and sending him to an early grave due to the resulting alcoholism.

Although this is a work of fiction, this book has many of the facts of this piece of history in it. The use of the novel as a way of telling the story of one of the most frightening periods of time in America is ingenious. Many people who otherwise aren't interested in history could become interested through this book because it is a fascinating account of the Red Scare told through the viewpoint of a fictional employee of Joe McCarthy.

 

Reviewed by Margaret Prior

If Joseph McCarthy hadn't existed, someone would have had to invent him--the communist witch-hunt he unleashed on 1950s America was, after all, the stuff of epic fiction. Now, it seems, someone has invented the senator from Wisconsin, or at least revised him. And that someone is none other than archconservative political pundit and sometime novelist William F. Buckley Jr., whose 12th work of fiction presents McCarthy in what many readers will consider an original light: that of a hero.

To do so, Buckley starts stacking his deck very early. In a prologue to The Redhunter, a history professor and former McCarthy colleague named Harry Bontecou sits reading a newspaper in a London club. The year is 1991, and as Harry muses over reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities, his mind wanders to the similar carnages committed by Stalin, the Nazis, and the East Germans. Only the arrival of an old, not entirely welcome acquaintance interrupts his reverie:

"Say." The insistent tone was off register in the quiet of the Garrick Club. One had the impression the leather volumes winced at Tracy's voice. "Didn't you used to be Harry Bontecou?"

Obviously the leather volumes are prescient, for the reader soon realises that Tracy Allshott is both drunk and boorish. After unsuccessfully baiting Bontecou on his early support of McCarthy, he announces priggishly that "there were those of us back in the fifties during the anti-Communist hysteria who were far-sighted and courageous enough to resist McCarthy and McCarthyism."

Whether it is Allshott's ungentlemanly accusations or an ensuing conversation with a repentant former Soviet spy, Harry soon resolves to tell his version of the McCarthy years and The Redhunter really starts to roll. Buckley is too accomplished a writer to hand us a Joseph McCarthy free of sin--indeed, as the story of the senator's life unfolds, we are made privy to such offences as the teenaged Joe hiring a classmate to take a final exam for him and the young politico Joe stretching the truth to the breaking point in a dirty campaign against his opponent. But the essential morality of the House Un-American Activities Committee is never questioned. In Buckley's view, the threat of Communism was a real one--so real, in fact, that it superseded any notion of due process, free speech, freedom of association, or any of the other little liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. Regardless of how you view McCarthy's actions, however, Buckley's novel offers an entertaining and eye-opening account of his rise and fall, complete with the media frenzy, senate hearings, and back-room manoeuvrings we've come to expect from literary intrigues Washington-style. This may not be the most objective treatment of the McCarthy years (Buckley ends his novel with a eulogy by Senator Everett Dirksen that describes McCarthy's "reward" for suffering "the vindictive fury which was unleashed against him" as "the living, pulsing shrine of hundreds of thousands of hearts in America"), but for readers with a short memory, it's above average entertainment. © Amazon.com

In a brief poem written in response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, W.H. Auden ridiculed the inexpressive nature of tyranny and tyrants: "One prize is beyond his reach, / The Ogre cannot master Speech." Now, it seems, the translator and novelist Richard Lourie has set out to prove Auden wrong. In The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin, he lets that chuckling despot tell his own story, from his obscure origins in the Georgian sticks to his bureaucratic apotheosis as ruler of all Russia. In part Stalin simply wants to get his life down on paper. But as he informs the reader, he's also trying to launch a pre-emptive strike against his arch-nemesis, Leon Trotsky, who's currently compiling a scurrilous (i.e., fundamentally accurate) biography of Stalin in Mexico City.

Given this scenario, many a novelist would have turned Uncle Joe into an articulate monster, a kind of Bolshevik Iago. Lourie takes a different route. Oh, his narrator does have a gift for poetic doublespeak, which comes into play during his ruminations on the 1938 Moscow show trials: "In a certain highly literal sense of the word, most of these men are not guilty of most of these crimes. They may, however, be guilty of many other crimes, crimes for which the state has decided to spare itself the expenses of a trial but which would have cost them their head in any case." He also gets off some memorable character sketches, like this one of Lenin:

He was five feet three at most but so solidly planted on the floor that he made you feel the smaller man. As the Hungarians say, his forehead reached to his ass, but his baldness was dynamic, not pathetic--as if intense thought had sent the hairs flying from his scalp. He wore a three-piece suit and had the lawyer's habit of hooking his thumbs inside his vest.

Still, Lourie's Stalin is very much a meat-and-potatoes stylist--perhaps blood-and-guts would be the more appropriate epithet, considering the number of corpses he leaves in his wake. His raw efficiency as a narrator does have its black-comic charms, however, and his race to the biographical finish with Trotsky gives the book a powerful momentum. (Students of history will recall that the narrator's rival was brutally cut off in mid-sentence.) And what would be the moral of Stalin's story, at least in Lourie's version? There are two, which should surprise nobody: Always watch your back and It's lonely at the top. © Amazon.com