By Samuel Damren

This is the fifth and final commentary in a series examining two periods of American history that Donald Trump claims were “great” compared to the present era: 1900 to 1910 and the post-World War II era through the 1950s.

The decade 1900-10 was the subject of the second and third commentaries in this series.

As previewed in the fourth commentary, Trump’s interest in the 1950s as a period of “greatness” has nothing to do with government policies of the time; but, instead resides in the political playbook employed by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare.  

It also is based on the fact that while McCarthy died in 1957, he and Trump shared the same lawyer across a span of decades: the notorious and once feared Roy Cohn.

Cohn was counsel to McCarthy’s permanent investigative subcommittee of the Senate’s Government Operations Committee. McCarthy was the Chair. He often conducted one-Senator hearings in violation of Senate rules and routinely teamed up with Cohn to question witnesses at Congressional hearings.

In the 1970s, well after McCarthy’s political downfall and censure by the United States Senate in December of 1954 for having treated fellow members with contempt, Cohn started working for the Trump Organization defending charges of racial discrimination in housing.  He soon became the young Donald Trump’s favorite lawyer and would serve as his “greatest mentor” according to associates.

In a Penthouse magazine interview in 1981, Cohn famously bragged “I decided long ago to make my own rules.” He, like McCarthy, died in disgrace, disbarred in 1986 from the practice of law for fraud, misrepresentation, and theft of client funds.

In “Ike and McCarthy” published in 2017, author David Nichols provides an exhaustive recitation of McCarthy’s political abuse and scare tactics as chairman of the Senate investigative subcommittee. Trump’s tactics in the politics of today are virtually inter-changeable with the tactics McCarthy and Cohn employed during the 1950s.

McCarthy made his first splash in national politics in 1950 when he delivered a speech in Wheeling, W.V. after the arrest by British authorities of a spy “channeling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.” In the speech, McCarthy claimed that he had “here in my hand the names of 205 communists in the State Department.”  

According to Nichols, the fact that McCarthy “did not actually have those names did not trouble him.” Making and publicizing accusations without support would become a mainstay for McCarthy just as it is for Trump.

Following his initial foray in the national spotlight, Nichols notes that “McCarthy presided over a permanent floating press conference. Lights, cameras, and microphones followed him everywhere.” He cowed critics with bombast and threats of being cast as disloyal anti-American communist sympathizers.

Accusations of that sort were of real political consequence in a time of high tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States.

During the 1952 presidential campaign, candidate Dwight Eisenhower was pressured by Republican officials to tolerate McCarthy’s self-promoting antics to shore up Wisconsin electoral votes. He did but was not happy about it.  

McCarthy had drawn Eisenhower’s ire the year before by “effectively charging” General George Marshall “with treason” for purportedly acceding to Soviet demands to set the 38th parallel as the dividing line between North and South Korea.

Disparaging and belittling American military heroes would become another “stock in trade” for McCarthy just as it is for Donald Trump.

In closed door Congressional hearings, McCarthy and Cohn repeatedly threatened witnesses with unjustified criminal charges and misled the press with supposed facts uncovered by their investigations.  

Doris Powell was a clerical worker for the Army involved in checking invoices for food purchases. She was on maternity leave when McCarthy subpoenaed her to appear for a hearing.

Prior to being employed by the Army, Powell worked briefly for “The People’s Voice,” a Harlem newspaper. McCarthy obtained a membership card in the communist party with her name on it. 

Powell never signed the card, nor paid dues nor joined the party. Unless she admitted membership in the communist party, McCarthy and Cohn threatened her with perjury charges. She refused.

After the hearing, McCarthy engaged in fanciful hyperbole by telling reporters that one of the witnesses being investigated by his subcommittee for ties to the communist party was a civilian Army employee with access through classified documents to troop movements around the globe.

Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Guliani, committed far greater abuses by falsely asserting across social media and in speeches that two female African-American poll workers in Georgia committed election fraud in the 2020 election. Trump similarly threatened Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger with criminal investigation unless he found another 11,780 Trump votes.

Based on allegations of guilt by association, McCarthy and Cohn indiscriminately accused many members of the military of being security risks, ruined lives and reputations and sought to drum them out of military service. One serviceman, Milo Radulovich of Dexter, Mich. fought back.

His case, designated a Michigan Legal Milestone in 1998, became the subject of a famous Edward R. Morrow broadcast lambasting McCarthy on the CBS program “See it Now” in 1954.

McCarthy would later be publicly reprimanded that same year by Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer engaged as private counsel for the Army, during televised hearings of McCarthy’s investigative subcommittee. When McCarthy gratuitously and falsely attacked a young associate in Welch’s firm during a heated moment in the proceeding, Welch memorably asked: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over the recent civil fraud trial of the Trump Organization in New York, must have shared a similar sentiment after Trump’s baseless and unrelenting attacks on his female law clerk during those proceedings.  

For many Americans, Welch’s stinging rebuke of McCarthy lifted the curtain on McCarthyism. To others, it may have been a different incident that did so; and, to still other Americans, it may have been the never-ending torrent of humiliations and cruelties that he heaped on anyone he perceived blocking his intended path.

For Joe McCarthy, it was – just as it is for Donald Trump – all about loyalty.

The lesson of McCarthyism is not that democracy ends when the dictator takes away the liberties and rights of free citizens.

The lesson of McCarthyism is that democracy ends when free citizens choose to give up their rights and liberties to prove unswerving loyalty to the leader.
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Samuel Damren is a retired Detroit lawyer and author of “What Justice Looks Like.”