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From McCarthy to Trump

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Abstract

The two most notorious demagogues in recent American political history (1945–2019) are linked through the unscrupulous lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who worked for them both. His career suggests an entree into a biographical effort to compare Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and President Donald J. Trump, both of whom demonstrated an aptitude for arousing popular fears and animosities and for sowing discord and divisiveness. Both were mendacious. Yet McCarthy did not directly and explicitly activate bigotry or nativism, in contrast to Trump, and did not rise above service as junior Senator from Wisconsin, posing less of a threat to democratic institutions and the rule of law.

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Notes

  1. Quoted in Michael S. Schmidt, “Trump Expected Sessions to Keep Leash on Inquiry,” New York Times, January 5, 2018, A1, and in Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 268.

  2. Pierre Guerlain, “US Foreign Policy of Chaos Under Trump: The Wreckers and the Puppeteers,” Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, 16, no. 2 (2018), 1, 4.

  3. Quoted in Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 47.

  4. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 35.

  5. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 19–20, 21.

  6. Quoted in Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade -- And After: America, 1945–1960 (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 116.

  7. William J. Bennett, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals (New York: Free Press, 1998, 17.

  8. Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 304.

  9. Quoted in Goldman, Crucial Decade, 142.

  10. Quoted in Goldman, Crucial Decade, 125, and in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 731.

  11. Josh Hafner, “Donald Trump Loves the ‘Poorly Educated,’” USA Today, February 24, 2016, at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/donald-trump-loves-the-poorly-educated/80860078/.

  12. Abramowitz, Great Alignment, 8, 140, 143, 159.

  13. Quoted in Schlesinger, Thousand Days, 733.

  14. Quoted in Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 8.

  15. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 23.

  16. Nelson W. Polsby, “McCarthyism at the Grass Roots” (1960), in The Meaning of McCarthyism, ed. Earl Latham (Lexington, Ma.: D. C. Heath, 1973), 160, 163–64.

  17. Andrew Hacker, “Hopeful Math,” New York Review of Books, 65 (September 27, 2018), 71; Alan I. Abramowitz, The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2018), 145, 148–50.

  18. Hacker, “Hopeful Math,” 71–72.

  19. Quoted in Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Ruler, 1945–1970, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 186–87.

  20. Quoted in Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 170.

  21. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 53, 73, 109–10, 136.

  22. Quoted in Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 52.

  23. Quoted in Woodward, Fear, 225, 227, 263, 286.

  24. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 99, 121.

  25. Quoted in Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 404.

  26. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 46, 47, 59, 162.

  27. Fred R. Shapiro, ed., The Yale Book of Quotations (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2006), 498.

  28. Woodward, Fear, 146, 271.

  29. Quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Sources of the ‘Radical Right,’” in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1964), 339.

  30. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 3.

  31. Frank Rich, “Roy Cohn was the Original Donald Trump,” New York, April 30, 2018, 15, at: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/frank-rich-roy-cohn-the-original-donald-trump.html.

  32. Joseph R. McCarthy, “A Conspiracy So Immense and an Infamy So Black --,” June 14, 1951, in Joseph R. McCarthy, ed. Allen J. Matusow (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 54–60; David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983), 197.

  33. Peter Beinart, “What the Tributes to George H. W Bush Are Missing,” December 2, 2018, at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/bush-race/577150/; Hacker, “Hopeful Math,” 73.

  34. Paul Krugman, “Real America Versus Senate America,” New York Times, November 9, 2018, A29; Avi Steinberg, “The Revelations of Robert Alter,” New York Times Magazine, December 23, 2018, 45.

  35. Quoted in Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 11, 12.

  36. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 8, 51.

  37. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 164–68.

  38. Rich, “Roy Cohn,” 2, 12.

  39. Karl Vick, “The Guardians,” Time, 192 (December 24–31, 2018), 60.

  40. Quoted in Eric Alterman, “Asymmetric Warfare,” Nation, 307 (December 31, 2018), 6.

  41. Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 244.

  42. Susan B. Glasser, “An Ocean Apart,” New Yorker, 94 (December 24 & 31, 2018), 52; Abramowitz, Great Alignment, ix, 165, 172; Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 10.

  43. Quoted in Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 473.

  44. Quoted in Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 68.

  45. Quoted in Susan B. Glasser, “‘This is Not a Normal Time’: Trump and the Rapidly Expanding ‘Witch Hunt,’” New Yorker, December 14, 2018, at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/this-is-not-a-normal-time-trump-and-the-rapidly-expanding-witch-hunt.

  46. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 258–59; Jon Meacham, “Trump and the Ghosts of Scandals Past,” Time, 102 (September 3–10, 2018), 32.

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  1. Department of American Studies, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 02454-9110, USA

    Stephen Whitfield

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Correspondence to Stephen Whitfield.

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Whitfield, S. From McCarthy to Trump. Soc 56, 192–199 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-019-00354-9

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