I am just old enough to remember grown-ups speaking with disquiet about McCarthyism. The first thick book I read was Louis Nizer’s My Life in Court, which was largely about Quentin Reynolds’s libel suit against Westbrook Pegler, impresario of the scurrilous Red Channels. And I also remember feeling a certain pride in the very large number of Jewish liberals who, like Nizer, helped bring America back to its senses.
Let the galoots disgrace themselves attacking war-heroes like General Marshall. Let weird groups like the John Birchers and Daughters of the American Revolution and Republican Tafters impugn a man’s integrity, then repeat each others’ insinuations, then spread them to widening circles in captive media (where sympathetic pens were waiting). Let them point to the public doubts they themselves manufactured “out of whole cloth,” as my father used to say.
Jews, and Jewish organizations, knew where they stood in the face of such smears. They stood for fairness, patience, sanity. We knew for whom an unfair, impatient, insane America would not “be good for.”
There was Fred Friendly, who collaborated with Edward R. Murrow in challenging McCarthy on CBS. There was Arthur Miller, whose 1953 play, “The Crucible,” about the Salem witch trials, was a thinly veiled attack on the House Un-American Activities Committee. There was I.F. Stone who, forced to strike out on his own, proved the grandeur of the First Amendment. There was Commentary magazine before Norman Podhoretz moved far to the right.
In the America I knew, which only grew more so during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, American Jews — with their worldly souls and experience of the social margins — were the natural opponents (because potential victims) of the fear, flocking, and fanaticism that produced political libels.
Which brings me to former Senator — and now Secretary of Defense — Chuck Hagel. I think it is time to acknowledge, bluntly, that certain major Jewish organizations, indeed, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations — also, the ADL, AIPAC, the AJC, political groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition, along with their various columnists, pundits, and Internet listserves — are among the most consistent purveyors of McCarthyite-style outrages in America today.
Hagel had the brass to call this grass green: Congresspeople will tell you openly that AIPAC has become one of the most feared, and secretly loathed, presences on Capitol Hill. Hagel spoke with thinly veiled contempt — which he came by honestly — of efforts by the Israeli lobby to intimidate dissenting diplomats and legislators.
Ah, but he spoke of the power of the “Jewish Lobby” — not the Israeli lobby — which was the opening the lobby’s hallelujah chorus needed to brand him a bigot. Funny: You disapprove of what Israel has become and you are told you are disapproving of Jews in the collective sense; but when you call the Israel lobby “Jewish” you have crossed the line into anti-Semitism.
Will no one put an end to this dangerous creepiness? Where is the American Jewish Ed Murrow, a figure with the necessary gravitas among Jews and their “friends” to expose the Jewish organizations in question and tell them that their defamations have to stop?
President Obama stuck with Hagel, but he cannot as president attack the power and intoxication of Jewish organizations, which have many Democratic supporters, any more than Eisenhower could simply attack McCarthy and Taft supporters and utterly divide the Republican Party. Any president must be a consensus builder and this one has an especial fear of divisiveness.