McCarthyism Revisited: TRB's Story

Introduction On February 9, 1950, Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin delivered a Lincoln Day speech before the Ohio County Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. The exact number of Communists the junior senator from Wisconsin claimed were in the State Department was the subject of great debate during the next four years and beyond.1 The idea that the U.S. government may have large numbers of "card-carrying" Communists in the State Department turned up the heat in a Cold War that previously had been fueled by events such as the conviction of alleged spy Alger Hiss for perjury and failed U.S. policy toward China (Griffith 44-45). When McCarthy delivered his speech, Richard L. Strout was in his seventh year as the New Republic's "Washington Wire" or "TRB" columnist, as well as his twenty-fifth year as a Washington correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.2 "One of the steadiest hands and minds in American journalism" is what Herbert Mitgang wrote in New York Times Magazine (Mitgang 63), while Dwight Jensen wrote, in the Biographical Dictionary of American Journalists, that Strout was one of those rare reporters "who became idolized by their colleagues during their lifetime" (McKerns 681). The New Republic and the Christian Science Monitor were the main publications Strout wrote for during his lengthy career, but his work also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, North American Review, Reader's Digest, and the Saturday Review. He won many national awards and received a special Pulitzer citation for lifetime achievement in journalism. Strout was a significant Washington, D.C., journalist. Many historians have placed heavy blame on the press for McCarthy's nearly five-year reign. James Boylan wrote that the elite of the Washington press corps "failed to meet the test in the basic journalistic sense of offering an account that could stand even rough historical scrutiny" (Boylan 31). David M. Oshinsky hinted that besides some notable exceptions "the press was quite fond of McCarthy," while the biographer Fred J. Cook asserted that generally speaking McCarthy's charges would make the headlines on the front page while the denial would not (Oshinsky 188, Cook 178). Other historians have been kinder to the press. Richard H. Rovere documented a large segment of the most powerful of the press that was always hostile to McCarthy, and Edwin R. Bayley contended that the reporting of McCarthy in the press was "no less thorough" than the press covering Watergate, but the one difference was that people in the early 1950s did not care (Rovere 269, Bayley 216). Regardless of the general comments pro and con about the press coverage of McCarthy and any previous research, documenting Strout's struggle against McCarthyism, both publicly and privately, adds to the understanding of the broad effects of the McCarthy era. Strout's writings in the New Republic and the Christian Science Monitor, and his personal thoughts revealed in his communications with Monitor management and letters to his family, provide another eyewitness account of a troubling era in U.S. history. Additionally, complications arising from the "doublelife" Strout led as the anonymous TRB and working for the "conservative" Monitor are intriguing if not enlightening about the pressures on reporters during the McCarthy era. This study, like Daniel Pfaff's research into the dynamics between Joseph Pulitzer II and two of his top editors at the St. Louis PostDispatch during the McCarthy era, "qualifies as a study of freedom and equity in journalism because of what it reveals about the inner workings of news editorial policy making in one of the country's most important daily newspapers" (Pfaff 53). Of course the difference between Pfaff's approach and this study is that the "inner workings" and policies of the Monitor collide with Strout's outside writings as TRB. This study also has similarities with Karen S. …