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Weapons of the Week: Like Joe McCarthy, I enjoy a good dossier.

Weapons of the Week: Like Joe McCarthy, I enjoy a good dossier.

Diplomatic relations, domestic repression. Plus: the truth about Joseph Welch, a bit of family history, and more.

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Tim Barker
Mar 12, 2025
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Weapons of the Week: Like Joe McCarthy, I enjoy a good dossier.
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Risks and rewards of building upscale town in West Bank | CNN

On Sunday, Israeli journalist Ben Caspit reported that “the secret and close advisor to Adam Buhler,” Trump’s Gaza hostage envoy, is Palestinian businessman Bashar al-Masri. Citing high-level US and Israeli sources, Caspit says that Buhler “has been flying in the region on al-Masri's plane for several months. Even before Trump took office, but also after.” Buhler’s spokesman did not comment.

Al-Masri is a billionaire; he also holds US citizenship. He developed Rawabi, “the first planned city built for and by Palestinians in the West Bank” (or, as Caspit calls it, Samaria).1 If Wikipedia is to be believed, the alleged “city” has at most a few thousand residents. Apparently, it is hard to master plan a community when an occupying power can forbid access to the water grid or impose “flying checkpoints.”

Mairav Zonzsein, one of the most trustworthy voices on the region, says that “The US talking directly to Hamas is the smartest move in US foreign policy on Israel-Palestine in decades.” I still expect the worst on more or less every front, but it seems impossible to rule out the possibility that Trump will be able to claim some sort of “Nixon going to China” breakthroughs, if not now then in the next four years.


One reason that Nixon could go to China was that Nixon had shed so much blood, literal and metaphorical, over the “loss of China.” The idea that one might split the USSR and the People’s Republic was not something that Kissinger and Nixon discovered one day in 1971. The State Department was perfectly aware of the possibility in 1949. Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, seriously considered recognizing Mao’s government, as our anti-Soviet allies in London did quickly and without drama.2 But “the Republicans, having lost the ‘48 election, decided to win the Chinese revolution instead” (as one US diplomat quipped).

(via Brown University)

Acheson, who spent most of his waking hours thinking about how to rebuild global capitalism, found himself accused of being a Communist. With a Trumpian gift for nicknames, Nixon dubbed him “the Red Dean of the College of Cowardly Containment.” Recognizing Mao was out of the question. Worse, Acheson was forced to do what he had tried hard to avoid: renewed US support for Chiang Kai-Shek’s dictatorship in Taiwan. This decision, which the “Red” Chinese reasonably understood as direct intervention into China’s civil war, did not improve Washington-Beijing relations. The sudden reversal of US policy on Taiwan influenced Mao’s willingness to intervene directly in the Korean War. By the end of 1950, Chinese soldiers and US soldiers were shooting each other. Normalization became impossible—until, twenty years later, Nixon seized the opportunity he had made for himself.

The China Lobby was hardly the only force behind the Second Red Scare. Nor was Nixon its only progenitor. But Tricky Dick has a better claim to the title than Joe McCarthy, who didn’t step into the spotlight until 1950, two years after Nixon sponsored legislation to require “individuals who knowingly and willfully participate in the world communist movement” to register with the attorney general, and thus to face criminal sanctions. To head off these measures—but also in service of its own ends—the Truman administration implemented a suite of repressive measures, including the deportation of immigrant radicals. As Richard Freeland writes in his classic account, “aliens who were active in opposition to Cold War foreign policy . . . were arrested and held without bail on Ellis Island.” For example:

Ferdinand Smith was picked up twenty-four hours after he shared a speakers’ platform with Henry Wallace and while en route to a meeting of the National Maritime Union at which endorsement of the Marshall Plan was the main item on the agenda.

Ferdinand Smith, National Secretary, National Maritime Union, with representatives of the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practices and the War Production Board, sometime during WWII (LOC)

Tom Clark, Truman’s attorney general, was

completely candid that his use of the legally dubious practice, [which] was disallowed by a federal court in March 1948, was intended to prevent the detained individuals from continuing their political activities. [As Clark said,] “I ordered Mr. Eisler picked up because he had been making speeches around the country that were derogatory to our way of life.”

These deportations, Freeland writes

were a clear warning to all unnaturalized aliens…that active opposition to Cold War foreign policy could subject diem to severe penalties. They also suggested to native Americans that opposition to the Administration’s policies was an alien concept, to be associated with deportable criminals.


You might now be thinking about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student activist who was kidnapped by ICE on March 8, in a Columbia owned building, in front of his wife, who is eight months pregnant. Khalil, a green card holder, is a lawful permanent resident of the US. Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally ordered the deportation, on the basis that Khalil’s “presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” He has not been charged with any crime; the Trump gang accuses him not of “aiding” but of “siding with terrorists.” I suspect large segments of Rubio’s political base in Miami could be accused of the same. As of this writing, we finally know where Khalil is being held (Louisiana). He has not been allowed to speak privately with his lawyers.

There are two sides to every story, as the New York Times is careful to remind us. According to the newspaper of record, some American Jews “see their security as inextricably bound up with that of other minority groups.” Others support the deportation of “supporters of Hamas,” which (these individuals remind the reporters) is “designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government.”

The conclusion one draws is that there are fine people on both sides.3 But the reporters tip their hand by concluding the piece with a sympathetic presentation (including generous quotations) of the view that anti-genocide protests have been systematically anti-Semitic. In the penultimate paragraph, the authors add ominously: “Nor did the confrontational protests end last school year. In January, four masked protesters entered a class” — and handed out fliers.

Anyone who thinks this level of “confrontation” is worth even mentioning as a justification for disappearing activists needs to read more about the history of countries like Chile and Argentina, where mass disappearances were preceded by protracted political conflict which frequently rose to the level of civil war. Left and right Peronistas were murdering each other in the street years before the notorious military dictatorship took over. Despite this “context,” people who are not reprehensible consider the disappearances in Latin America to be world-historical atrocities. Anyone who thinks masks and fliers “complicate” the story of Mahmoud Khalil is someone who would have supported the juntas early, and enthusiastically. They would have lined up with the neoconservative Irving Kristol when he attacked the former political prisoner Jacobo Timerman.

It is heartening that some liberals and centrists, including people who have not been heard from much in the last year and a half, are now speaking out clearly. Among Democratic politicians, Chris Murphy’s statement is notably forthright, especially compared to the equivocations of his colleagues. Brad DeLong, the most interesting mainstream economist in America (but a mainstream economist all the same), is willing to put his name behind a statement like this:

I hope that this moment will teach large numbers of people that anyone concerned with the future of US domestic politics cannot ignore the Israel/Palestine issue—at least not if they want to keep their bearings, moral and cognitive. Millions of people have already signed a petition demanding Khalil’s immediate release. Millions more should sign. You can be one of them.


In January, the FT reported that Jake Sullivan was “contemplating taking a position teaching at a university in Boston.” As it turns out, this was not the half of it. We now know that Sullivan will be the the inaugural Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order. This reinforces my sense, which I shared last time, that the key to Sullivan’s Ukraine strategy is the following paragraph by David Ignatius of the Washington Post:

It was a sensible, cold-blooded strategy for the United States — to attrit an adversary at low cost to America, while Ukraine was paying the butcher’s bill…Kissinger would have approved.

You can claim that you’re arming other countries because of moral values, or you can be the Henry Kissinger Professor of Practice. You can’t do both.

“Power is the best aphrodisiac.” - Henry Kissinger

My first thought on reading this news was that Sullivan was making a mistake. Even at a den of hyenas like Harvard, Kissinger was for decades unable to speak except at events whose timing and location were carefully guarded, in every sense. He certainly could never have been a Harvard professor with regularly scheduled classes. Because the world will not forget Gaza, anymore than we have forgotten Chile and Cambodia, there will be moments when Sullivan is forced to confront his red record. But the point of the escalating repression on campus is to make sure that such disruptions are held to a minimum. Sometimes, when the operation of the machine becomes too odious for young people to bear, you’ve got to get under the hood, locate the faulty bearings, and throw them into the trash. Then those engines can really hum.

I’m generally opposed to nostalgia, but I do think that one thing we should remember just how poorly today’s establishment measures up against the centrist/liberal establishment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The traumas of the American defeat Vietnam—which for the elite, did not include death or injury but did involve moral injury as well as domestic disorder and turbulence in the world financial system—meant that for a brief moment people close to the center of power were willing to consider searching critiques of the fundamental premises of US foreign policy. Can you imagine today’s New York Times running a headline like “The Big Defense Firms Are Really Public Firms and Should be Nationalized”? Could today’s mass media allow a politically powerful investment banker to propose that “the U.S. give up its lonely, dangerous role as global policeman”? Can you imagine a Senator confronting the CIA with their own poison dart gun (as Frank Church, below, did)?

Frank Church holds CIA poison dart gun in 1975, learn more in the church oversight committee pdf

Walt Whitman Rostow spent the decades after 1969 in Austin, Texas. This was because MIT, where he had taught before going down to the Potomac, would not take him back. Neither, apparently, would any Ivy League university. There was even a fight within the Council on Foreign Relations [!] about whether their presidency should be offered to William Bundy, given his “key role in planning Vietnam and in the calculated deception of the public.” This was the same moment that another Establishment institution, the New York Times, was publishing the Pentagon Papers, whose revleations led one CFR director to say he “never dreamed a lot of those things, certainly not what Bill was up to.” According to echt-Establishment scion Douglas Dillon, CFR faced “a really terrifying prospect” that “the Bundy issue could irrevocably split the academic and business wings of the Council.”

It was a false alarm: even back then, the elite academic community was hardly about to break up something as important as CFR over something as minor as Vietnam. But the fact that this fight happened at all is remarkable. Writing his memoirs decades later, David Rockefeller—a man used to getting what he wanted—was still palpably shocked and angry about the anti-Bundy dissent.


One of the government employees subjected to Truman’s loyalty program was my grandmother, who had a run-of-the-mill job with the Veteran’s Administration. She was not and had never been a member of the Communist Party, but the FBI believed someone in her family had signed a petition to get a Communist on the ballot in a local election. In 1952, the US federal government spent less than 1% of GDP on programs for social security, welfare, and health. Also in 1952, the federal government paid real money to professional handwriting experts to study this document, as if it held real significance for national security:

Talk about government efficiency. For something as small as this, multiple federal agents spent months looking at her mail, talking to her old neighbors and bosses. In the five years before she got the job at the VA, my grandmother held five different jobs. The federal agents tracked down coworkers from every one of these workplaces, trying to find someone to say something incriminating. According to one informant, my grandmother was guilty, if nothing else, of being from the Lower East Side:

the appointee, her sister and her brothers, appeared to be dissatisfied with the American way of life, and they felt very bitter about the fact that they were not well off, financially speaking.

The agents also took note of the fact that she had “severed all religious affiliations” and “had civil marriage.” At the same time they connected her to the Communist Party through her relatives, they also entertained the theory that she had been “loyal until marriage” and then made “a political about face to oblige husband.” Women: excessively independent from family traditions, and also excessively deferential to their chosen partners? But kettle logic has never bothered the counter-subversive.

My grandmother talked a lot about McCarthyism in the years before her death in 2022. She was an optimist, in part I assume because that was a way of getting through the bad things that happened to her, so she liked liked to focus on the story of Joseph Welch, the attorney who stood up to Tailgunner Joe at the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. As Welch said, famously: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” After that, she recalled, it was like a spell was broken, and a bad dream was over.

Wanted: Our Joseph Welch in 2024 | The Awkward Pose
Left to right: Josephs Welch and McCarthy.

Having led an easier life, it is easier for me to take a pessimistic view. The real story of the Army-McCarthy hearings is that McCarthy—having helped Republicans turn the stunning defeat of 1948 into electoral success in 1950 and 1952 —had outlived his usefulness to the mainstream of his party.

Worse, in targeting the Army, McCarthy was targeting Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens. Like almost everyone in Eisenhower’s cabinet, Stevens was a millionaire and a member of the high-powered Business Advisory Council.

Unlike most of the people targeted by McCarthy, Robert T. Stevens had the right friends. As Hobart Rowen, whose Harper’s piece was the first prominent journalistic treatment of the secretive Business Advisory Council, recounted:

During the May 1954 [BAC] meeting at Homestead [a luxury retreat in rural Virginia], Stevens flew down from Washington for a weekend reprieve from his televised torture. A special delegation of Business Advisory Council officials made it a point to journey from the hotel to the mountaintop airport to greet Stevens. He was escorted into the lobby like a conquering hero. Then, publicly, one member of the BAC after another roasted the Eisenhower Administration for its McCarthy-appeasement policy. The BAC's attitude gave the Administration some courage and shortly thereafter former senator Ralph Flanders (a Republican and BAC member) introduced a Senate resolution calling for [McCarthy’s] censure.

Joseph Welch, the man who stood up to McCarthy, was himself a partner at the multinational corporate law firm which today is known as WilmerHale.

By the end of 1954, the Senate had voted 62-22 to censure McCarthy. Tailgunner Joe drank himself to death before he turned 50. Later, they made a Hollywood movie about Robert T. Stevens, or at least about the textile company his family owned. You might have heard of it: Norma Rae.

The point being: McCarthy fell because he was opposed (eventually) by a powerful section of the Establishment. Given that today’s ruling class has greeted the intensifying repression with acquiescence or enthusiasm, I find it hard to hope for anything similar, anytime soon.

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