"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." This saying is often attributed to Mark Twain, who said everything except what Winston Churchill, Will Rogers and Abraham Lincoln said.Besides rhyming, history also whistles as it walks past our open door. That's what happened yesterday after I wrote a blog post entitled "The End of Donald Trump." It was about how a corner has been turned in the downfall of Trump. In the space of only two weeks, three Republican senators have denounced him, as have former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and a former GOP Congressman from Florida. Even Trump's own Secretary of State, a darling of the oil industry and a big shot of big business, has called Trump "a moron." Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly has contributed to the slide by revealing that Kelly is not a steady hand in the White House but a fellow patient in the "adult day-care center" that the White House has become. Those tolerating the unstable Trump can no longer rely on the steadiness they attributed to General Kelly as a barrier to a nuclear exchange with North Korea.
After I posted yesterday's blog, a phrase started going through my mind: "At long last, sir, have you no decency left." It was history whistling as it crossed my doorway, whispering to me that it was a time of deja vue all over again.
Then about 10 p.m. I recognized the phrase. These are the words spoken in the mid-1950's that ended the reign of terror of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Since Trump's inauguration we have been living through another era like the McCarthy era but now — as happened then — honest words of strong character will mark the end of the Trump awfulness even as they marked the end of the reign of terror of Senator Joe McCarthy. History was whistling a cheery tune last night. Just as I heard it, so did Senator Flake last night, and thus he announced today on TV that we are now living in another McCarthy era. If Senator Flake and I both heard the whisper and whistling, they've got to be for real!
The lesson for us in the McCarthy era is that it doesn't take hoards of dissenters to remove a monster. It may take but one person of courage and well-chosen words. More than one such person spoke out against Donald Trump in the past two weeks, but the words of Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona could have done the job all by themselves. If you haven't heard or read them, you should. Read them and then save them for your children. Of such is history made. Full Transcript: Jeff Flake’s Speech on the Senate Floor
I am also including at the end of this post the words that marked the end of the McCarthy reign of terror. They were spoken by a gentle, quiet attorney for the U.S. Army named Joseph Welch in defense of a young attorney recently hired at his law firm, whom McCarthy now sought to besmirch as a Communist. McCarthy was simultaneously trying to use the "Communist" charge to bring down the Secretary of State, having already caused thousands of people to be fired in government and in the defense industry, the public schools, the ministry and even the Girl Scouts. What he did to Hollywood and to writers has been well-publicized. (For a fact-based drama on Hollywood's sufferings, see "The Front" and watch how the McCarthy era drove a comedian to suicide.) No one was too big or small to escape the terror. At the top even President Eisenhower was afraid of McCarthy (see account at the end of this posting). At the bottom of the heap, a new graduate like me lost a job I had just been given when the interviewer suddenly asked, "Did you say you went to Cal? That Communist school?"
Not everyone survived the McCarthy era, but America got through it and somehow we put the pieces together again. A famous Hollywood director quietly sought scripts for black-listed directors. (I was among those solicited for such script and was doing one on a pair of gun-slingers named Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, unaware another writer had the jump on me.) Meantime the Academy Award for the great classic "High Noon" had been denied the true creator because of the blacklisting.
The words that ended McCarthy's cruel abuse of power are simple and heartfelt. As with Senator Flake's words, keep them for your children. And let your children know that the attorney who spoke them in real life later became the judge in that fine, fun film "Anatomy of a Murder". I guess giving him the role was Hollywood's attempt to say thank you to the soft-spoken man who braved the monster. Within a couple of months of Welch having denounced McCarthy, the Senate found its backbone and sanctioned McCarthy. He died a couple of years later of alcoholism.
And please enjoy one particular grace note that the lovely rhyming of history bestows on us in these events. Participating with McCarthy in those Senate hearings was Roy Cohn, later the chum of J. Edgar Hoover in his abuse of power. So that history may rhyme even more insistently, the vicious Roy Cohn soon became mentor and model to no other than the young Donald Trump. You can't make up stuff like this! What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy's Right-Hand ...
Let us hope the circle now will close on such Frankenstein monsters as Cohn, McCarthy, and Trump so that America can go back to the happy businesses of baseball, movie-making, and Russian-free elections. There may still be some final fireworks to get through but — like Trump himself — they will be mostly empty noise. And not loud enough to drown out such soft-spoken words as these:
- Joseph N. Welch - Wikipedia
Welch to McCarthy: - "Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us....Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.
When McCarthy tried to renew his attack, Welch interrupted him:
- Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
Ike afraid of McCarthy:
"During the 1952 presidential election, the Eisenhower campaign toured Wisconsin with McCarthy. In a speech delivered in Green Bay, Eisenhower declared that while he agreed with McCarthy's goals, he disagreed with his methods. In draft versions of his speech, Eisenhower had also included a strong defense of his mentor, George Marshall, which was a direct rebuke of McCarthy's frequent attacks. However, under the advice of conservative colleagues who were fearful that Eisenhower could lose Wisconsin if he alienated McCarthy supporters, he deleted this defense from later versions of his speech. The deletion was discovered by William H. Laurence, a reporter for The New York Times, and featured on its front page the next day. Eisenhower was widely criticized for giving up his personal convictions, and the incident became the low point of his campaign....." Joseph McCarthy - Wikipedia
