Anti-Anticommunism Again

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

May 12, 1998 12:01 am ET

In February 1950, the then little known Sen. Joseph McCarthy made a speech claiming there were 205 communists working in the State Department. An anticommunist purge had been under way for several years, and the national mood had become more nervy still with lurid espionage cases, the communist victory in China and the first Soviet atom bomb.

This was the potential for hysteria that McCarthy exploited in his brief career of demagoguery. Little more than four years later his attack on the Army began, and with it his own downfall. Many books have already been written about that episode, and there is room for another that would soberly analyze the struggle against communism, and its warped by-product in McCarthyism. This is not it.