Abstract
In the late summer of 1953 President Eisenhower faced a barrage of reports from his Ambassadors in Europe complaining about the sudden decline in American prestige. It was so bad, in fact, that the National Security Council meeting of 30 July 1953 witnessed a memorandum that boiled down to a simple point: ‘U.S. prestige in the world is now lower than ever before.’ The question was simple: why? CD. Jackson, who was in charge of the Eisenhower administration’s psychological warfare (read propaganda) campaigns, had a simple answer: ‘the Number One reason for this situation is McCarthyism’.1
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Notes
The most recent comprehensive account of McCarthyism in the United States is Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston, 1998).
The following is a sample of earlier McCarthy literature: John G. Adams, Without Precedent: the Story of the Death of McCarthyism (New York, 1983);
Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison, WI, 1981);
Donald E Crosby, God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978);
William B. Ewald, McCarthyism and Consensus (Lanham, MD, 1986);
William B. Ewald, Who Killed McCarthy? (New York, 1984);
Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: the McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York, 1990);
Richard M. Fried, Men against McCarthy (New York, 1976);
Marjorie Garber and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds, Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism and Fifties America (London, 1995);
Robert C. Goldston, The American Nightmare: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Politics of Hate (Indianapolis, 1973);
Robert K. Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Amherst, MA, 1987);
Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis, eds, The Specter; Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York, 1974);
Mark Landis, Joseph McCarthy: the Politics of Chaos (London, 1987);
David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy so Immense: the World of Joe McCarthy (New York, 1983);
Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (New York, 1982);
Michael P. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: the Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA, 1967).
John P. Rossi, ‘The British Reaction to McCarthyism, 1950–1954’, Mid-America 70:1 (1988), 5–18 (citation on page 6).
Quoted in Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1991), p. 59.
Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, pp. 256–8; Reeves, The Life and Times, 459–85. McCarthy dropped his opposition to Conant after a meeting with Vice President Nixon, but did bitterly, albeit unsuccessfully, oppose Bohlen. See Ambrose, Eisenhower, p. 59; Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as a Leader (New York, 1982), pp. 167–8.
On Roy Cohn, see Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn (New York, 1988).
This particular episode is covered in, for example, Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York, 1997), pp. 80–2; Reeves, Life and Times, pp. 489–91.
Cited in John W. Young, ‘Cold War and Detente with Moscow’, in The Foreign Policy of Churchill’s Peacetime Administration 1951–1955, ed. by John W. Young (Leicester, 1988), p. 55.
See also Young’s Winston Churchill’s Last Campaign: Britain and the Cold War 1951–1955 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 123–5.
Churchill to Eisenhower, 7 April 1953. In Peter G. Boyle, ed., The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence (Chapel Hill, 1990), p. 42.
Cited in Thomas C. Sorensen, The Word War: the Story of American Propaganda (New York, 1968), p. 82.
Clement Attlee, ‘Britain and America: Common Aims, Different Opinions’, Foreign Affairs 32:2 (January 1954, pp. 201–2.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Hanhimaki, J.M. (2001). ‘The Number One Reason’: McCarthy, Eisenhower and the Decline of American Prestige in Britain, 1952–54. In: Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Relations. Contemporary History in Context Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985311_6
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