Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to part two of Joe McCarthy, who has rapidly risen to the role of U S. Senator of Wisconsin. Initially seen as a moderate Republican, his first few years as senator were not especially remarkable. He was noted, however, for being an excellent orator, but his reputation would soon change.
I'm doctor Gale Salts, and this is Personology. My guest again today is journalist and author Larry Tye, a New York Times bestselling author and author of newly released Demagogue, The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. We've sort of talked about the groundwork as to why Joe McCarthy might have been the right person characteriologically to embark on what he ultimately did. But there was also, you have to say, somewhat of a right person at the
right time and right place. Right. So it so happened that in during the Cold War Jitters rising Uh, the House un American Activities Committee becomes a permanent House committee having nothing to do with Joe McCarthy himself, so that the idea of investigating communist subterfuge becomes a reality in the Senate at that time, and concerns about the Cold War means that the American public is very comfortable and ready to buy into the concern that Communism has to
be ferreted out in any way possible. So I think it goes back to the word opportunists, and there are two sides to that word. One is recognizing the opportunity and the other is willingness to exploit it. The opportunity was there, and that we were I don't know what kind of language I can use here, but we were scared as heck in terms of what was going on
in the world. There was a real threat off in the Soviet Union, and there was a real sense in America that we could go to nuclear war and kids would very shortly be taught on how to duck and cover under their desks. That was the response if there was a nuclear attack and the time was ripe for
somebody to come along. And John McCarthy brilliantly understood that fear, and like any good opportunist or any good demagogue, knew how to play for it, played to it, and he played to it not with a realistic and sensible and boring response He played to it with dynamism. He played to it with dynamite. He played to it by saying things that weren't true, but that he knew his listeners
would want to hear. And he understood that just saying that there were maybe traders out there, Um, if you did it in general terms, wasn't going to mean anything. What you had to do was he had to name the traders, and you had to count the traders. And he knew how to, in a wild West kind of way, go in and really shake things up. You know. He stoked general paranoia, right, And of course, as the saying goes, just because your paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies.
So we did have enemies, and people were fearful about that, which does tend to ignite more paranoia because there's always
a kernel of seeds of truth there. And the question, you know, so paranoid is a term that went along with Joe McCarthy for for many years, uh following his death even and the question is really whether we don't see a lot of evidence of paranoia before this time, right, we don't see him walking around supposing enemies all over the place and being paranoid, which is interesting because when someone has let's say, paranoid personality disorder, you would expect
to see it much earlier than this in their life. Uh, It's it's true that a traumatic event can happen that can change someone's trajectory and make them more paranoid. And it's also true, and I think this does become a question that substance use and abuse can also heighten a person's paranoia. And so we do have to wonder whether ultimately that comes to bear in terms of the degree
of paranoia that he seems to exhibit. But it does seem at this juncture that it's more likely that, as you said, he sees an opportunity, and he sees that the general paranoia that can be ignited and inflamed can be an avenue for him playing the role of rescuer protector and therefore holding the power holding being the gatekeeper
and UM, and that's just that is very interesting. Whether that ultimately later dovetails with his increasing drinking and as we'll get to later, the use of other substances that may have heightened his thoughts around this UM is also something worth positing. But let's move as you said to UM, Really, his launch into McCarthy is m like his launch into this whole prosecutorial role. Yes, so I want to just revisit paranoia for one second and we can come back
to this later. UM. I would say that while Um he was often called a paranoid, especially in the early days, UM he was anything, but he was playing to other people's paranoia. But he was seeing things clearly, and he knew that he didn't believe in what he was saying. I'd love to take your listeners to a moment where I think McCarthy is m was born, and that moment
was in February of nineteen fifty. There is a tradition in Republican circles in America that the one night that is best to raise money is when you are honoring the birthday of the patron saint to the Republican Party, Abe Lincoln, And they're famously called Lincoln Day dinners. And if you're a prominent U. S. Senator, you get invited to places like New York and Boston and San Francisco and Chicago. If you're Joe McCarthy, the consummate backbencher who
looks like he's on his way to defeat. After one term, you get invited to Wheeling, West Virginia, which is where he gave the speech. That night, he shows up with a briefcase with two speeches. One of them is a snoozer of a speech on national housing policy that he actually knew something about, and had he picked that speech that night to deliver you and I seventy years later,
wouldn't be paying attention to Joe McCarthy. But instead he grabbed the other speech in his briefcase, and that is a speech on a subject that he knows arguably less about than any other member of the U. S. Senate in that year of nineteen fifty, and that's a speech on the communist threat not in the Soviet Union, but
behind every pillar in the U. S. State Department. So he grabs a sheaf of papers and he waves it around like this in the air, saying, I have in my hand the list of two hundred and five subversives in the State Department, and I have the actual names, and I know the jobs they have, and I'm going to call on the government to route these people out.
And it was a passionate speech, and it was a brilliant speech, and it was, as his fellow senators would later conclude, a fraud in a hoax because a he had I don't know what he had in his hand. His friends have speculated that it could have been that day's racing sheet. But what it was it wasn't a list of two hundred and five subversives in the government.
What it probably was was a list, a recycled list, based on the things that I saw in his archives, a recycled list of the House on American Activities and other early first generation Red hunters in America. Many of the people who we actually had names of were people who no longer worked for the State Department, or who had had a sister or a brother in law, or their own association with left wing activities twenty years before.
They were not Flaming spies. Most of the twenty four Carrot spies had been rooted out long before Joe McCarthy joined the hunt, most of the ones. When we got to see the Russian archives, most of the spies who were still there, Joe McCarthy wouldn't have recognized if he had tripped over them in the dark on the way to his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. But what happened two days after his speech was he was on page one of every newspaper in America. He had the Truman
administration on the defensive, and he never turned back. That was the moment where he realized this was the issue that was going to bring him the limelight. And if there was a moment where McCarthy ism was given birth, it was in front of that audience of mine operators and whoever else was there that night who didn't recognize what was going on and didn't recognize for sure that a crusade like we had not seen in a long
time in America was being born. You mentioned, who knows what those papers were in his hand, Maybe they were race sheets. I should mention that actually Joe McCarthy was a gambler. He he liked to bet, He bet in all kinds of ways, and and that's just important to keep in mind. Well clearly that that night he bet on himself and uh and one and the thrill of the wind, whether we're talking about horse races or his individual political races or you know, political moments, the reward
of that was addictive. I'm gonna I'm gonna say addictive for Joe McCarthy. He had Um. You know, some people from a neuro lot and from a neurological point of view, are more susceptible to addiction than others. There is something about their dopamine, the neurotransmitter dopamine of reward, that reward system that is primed to take off and super reward. Whether it's a gambling win, whether it's with substance use and addiction to alcohol or drugs, or whether even it's
something like a political win. But the thing that gives you that dopamine high is just irresistible. And that seemed to be a really important feature that we see in many different ways, the ways in which he was I'll almost say a slave to his dopamine system, um, and how that drove a lot of behaviors for him. But upon this win this night, as you said, there was
no turning back. And it's interesting because from a concrete point of view, you know, is there any evidence that he wanted to be president, that he wanted to and of the words move into into that position of power or what was the end goal? So there was no end goal, and that to me is one of the fascinating things and it is reminiscent of what we see maybe going on today. That the goal was to get power and hold on to power. It was not what you would do with it, whether he ever wanted to
be president. Every time he would deny it to one person, he tells somebody else he did. I saw a wonderful check that had never been cashed to the McCarthy for President committee in his um personal papers. But I want to just say one more thing about the addiction. You talked about it compellingly from a mental health point of view.
I want to say that in later years, when McCarthy went after not just communists, but he went after gays and lesbians in government, he said that the reason he was doing that was because they're being closeted where their sexual orientation made them vulnerable to blackmail by Soviet operatives.
I think Joe McCarthy's addictions made him vulnerable. His gambling addiction is what he was doing with his money, his alcohol consumption, all of those are things that made him more vulnerable than all the people he was targeting for their alleged vulnerabilities. And it is one more way where we see hypocrisy defining what he did. But that's another element I think of opportunism, well, hypocrisy, but what I
would call projection, right, these things within himself. Um, I mean, he was the one being the bad guy, He was the one lying, He was the one destroying other people's lives, and he projected all of this out and including as you said, the addictions and the self destructive and and stigmatized behaviors that he was committing. All of this was projected out. It's I'm not the problem. Other people are
the problem, right. Other people are the spies, the bad guys, the self destructive guys, the stigmatized guys, and and that was a huge part of his m O. I guess I'll say that he that he needed to project all these things outward and he but at the same time, sadly, for many other people in this country. Again, his moral compass didn't seem to make him sympathetic at all or empathetic at all in terms of destroying other people's lives.
He was sympathetic and empathetic only when he was going out for the drink after he had destroyed them during the day, and when he was taking him out and being their buddy afterwards. He was a bit empathetic. But in terms of the randomness of this whole um launch of McCarthy is um, I want to just it is partly fatuous, but I also think it partly suggests how
random the whole thing was. One of the many ways his numbers that first week kept changing between especially two numbers two communists or fifty seven, and the fifty seven, it was suggested, could have come he was a big Hamburger eater, and it suggested that he might have gone in and used Hines fifty seven sauce and that number stuck in his mind. And that wouldn't surprise me because the numbers didn't mean much of anything, and it could have come from anywhere. Let's take a quick break here.
We'll be back in a moment, bed bed bedding. It is important for people to understand it was not unusual will for him to have a multi drink lunch, um to show up on the floor after lunch appearing drunk, to show up the next day in the Senate appearing hungover, and um somewhere in this time period became this really unfathomable story that it seemed he was probably at some point started to use opiates. It may have started because
he he was prescribed them for pain. He had a lot of accidents, he broke a bone or or something like that. Um it may have started because he had terrible hangovers the next day and was looking for some relief.
But UM, the story of the secrecy of his addiction, the discovery by the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and his the the Federal Bureau of Narcotics being convinced that they basically had to maintain his habit UH to somehow protect the world or protect his ongoing crusade against communism, provided him ongoing morphine via a Washington, d c. Pharmacy and the impact of that secret because you have to understand that if you think drug use and alcohol
use or substance abuse is stigmatized today, which it is a deeply, deeply stigmatized and not understood really as an illness, the degree to which it was stigmatized in the nineteen fifties is UH today pales in comparison. So I want to push back a little bit. So what you said about the morphine addiction, the opioid addiction UM was reported in the newspapers, and it was in an unnamed way by the guy who ran the drug agency, and Slinger
was his name. UM. He indicated that there was an unnamed senior politician who this happened to, when everybody presumed and it may have been that he was referring to McCarthy. The pushback on that as I want to be fair to him. There's enough that we know about what he did that that would have shown up, I think given the way his alcohol addiction did in his exhaustive records, thousands of pages of records UM from Bethesda Naval Hospital.
And I didn't trust who am I a an old health reporter to sit down and try to make sense of that and whether there was really any sign of addiction there. So I sat down with three doctors, one of whom had just stepped down as dean of Harvard Medical, A second was the editor in chief emeritus of New England Journal, and the third was an expert on a lot of the areas that McCarthy had suffered various medical woes.
And we actually there were four doctors and we sat down and looked through every one of those pages, and there was no evidence in his medical records. That doesn't mean that he wasn't addicted, but it was no evidence of that addiction. There was a jolting and upsetting set of evidence of his alcohol addiction, and it was there at an early stage from the moment that he was condemned by his fellow senators. That alcohol consumption was quantified
in the records. And the only surprise to me is that he lived as long as he did drinking that much in the later years. But one of the interesting things we now have access to all of the nine thousand pages of transcripts of McCarthy's closed door hearings, two thirds of his hearings were behind closed doors. He thought that they would never become public, and they showed Joe
McCarthy unhinged when he thought nobody was watching. And one of the many interesting things to me in those hearings, it wasn't just how he abused the rights of witnesses and how somebody who appeared before him in a private closed door session that was used as a staging ground to see whether they wanted to bring him before the public and if they were too good a witness, meaning if they fought back effectively. They never showed up in the public hearings. It was only the ones that he
knew that he could get the better of. But another thing, and it may be my looking for it, but I don't think so. His demeanor changed from the morning sessions, where I think he was sober, to the afternoon sessions, where his fuse became shorter. He gave longer diet tribes of speeches, and I think it was for two reasons. I think one, his standard lunch was a burger, a raw onion, and whiskey, and I think he had had enough whiskey at lunch that he lost his temper more
quickly in the afternoon. But the other thing that I'm intrigued about from his medical records is he had hemorrhoids. And it may just have been if you sit for two hours, the hemorrhoids are controllable. You start looking nasty after four or five, have a six hours Okay, So that's interesting. Well, certainly chronic pain of any sort could
definitely shorten your fuse, no question about it. And we have to wonder why he went from really being I guess we'd have to argue quite successful in his pursuits right, in his effect and in his acruement of power in terms of inflicting McCarthy ism on the on the nation to to ultimately creating his own downfall by going for
the military, for going going at the army. And that seems like such a clear, uh self destructive maneuver, I guess, I'll say, or a very very poor decision that we have to wonder what what was instrumental in that decision for him that ultimately brought his downfall. So I think what happened to Joe McCarthy is he began his crisis sight of McCarthy is um with that accidental delivery of a speech that he never knew was going to take
off in that way. And he knew in those early days when he was raising those charges that he was being an opportunist and that he didn't have to believe in the things. I think over time, something strange happened that he started to believe his own rhetoric in early
nineteen fifty four. By the time he took on the military, he had failed to see that he was overstepping that you could bully people in the State Department, you could get away with it at the Voice of America, you could get away with it in the government printing office because nobody particularly knew who those people were or cared much about them. But there was an institution in America that was too big to bully. That was the U. S. Army.
That was also the moment when he did that, that not just the army eventually developed a backbone and taking him on, but our commander in chief, the one person in America more popular than Joe McCarthy, This former war hero Dwight Eisenhower, finally understood that the army was something he wasn't going to let McCarthy get away with bullying. He understood that McCarthy was overstepping, and Joe McCarthy went one step further. Had he not done that, he could
have gone on for years. But I also think what happened. We look at his poll numbers and when he took on the Army, the U. S. Senate, his old sub committee ended up running what was the most famous set of hearings ever run. They were called the Army McCarthy Hearings. At the start of those hearings, Joe McCarthy was at a full fifty percent popularity. The gallop Poles said one in every two Americans thought he was doing a great job.
By the end of those hearings in the summer of nineteen fifty four, his numbers had gone from fifty down to thirty. And anybody who's old enough to member those hearings remembers one magical moment where a very smart, Harvard trained lawyer from Boston named Joe Welch stood up and said when McCarthy went after Welch's young associate and said that he had been affiliated with a left wing legal group,
Joe Welch famously said, Senator, have you no decency? Well, the truth is that was not the magical moment, and the truth is Joe Welch had been waiting during the entire hearings. He was a performer as well as a lawyer. He had concocted that line and he was waiting for a magical moment to deliver it. He picked a great moment.
But the moment only worked because I think Americans had been watching this guy, who they thought was their hero, look more like the schoolyard bully on public television, and they wanted to ask, Senator, have you no decency? And so that line crystallized the question America had on its mind. It showed the power of television to take a guy who was a schoolyard bully and make him look that way to the American public. And my book begins with the line, this is a book about America's love affair
with bullies. But I also think that American knows when a bully is really going too far and it will part company. So I wrote a book in part about one of the darkest chapters in American history. But I think there is ultimately a very uplifting message of this book and the book. The message is in American history with our uniquely American strain of demagogues, from Huey Long and the Jew baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coglin to Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. The lesson is that give
a demagogue enough rope and they will hang themselves. And is part of the hanging that the overreach for power, the displaying who you really are inside, and people finally being able to grasp that. What what is the lesson that we can we can learn today about ultimately? You know, is it the doer or the dewey that ultimately catches on to the demagoguery. Great question, It's both. I believe
two things about the American people. I believe we are more naive and susceptible to bullying into demagoguery than we think about ourselves, because we've shown it repeatedly, you know, George Wallace, the lots of people who we've bought into. But I think in the end it is partly demagogues doing themselves in and it's partly America coming to its senses. And I believe and I pray that throughout every phase of history, including today, that in the Americans recognize bullies.
And I think that we saw the first effective pushback against some of the bullying that Donald Trump does come from the US military. It came from when he did over the last month things staging um, the photo opportunity outside the White House, across the street from the park
and clearing people so we had a path to get there. UM. The commanders in chief of the various arms services, I'm sorry, the heads of the various armed services, UM, Defense secretaries, UM, the heads of joint chiefs of staff passed in present. When the military is bullied, they stand up and say that institution you can't touch. And I think that I think Donald Trump is a very smart politician, and he
probably learned a lesson there. But I also think that he has almost to the letter, followed the Joe McCarthy playbook in the last three and a half years. And it is not a playbook that I'm as an author writing about Joe McCarthy, and I say, jeez, he's using that playbook because I want to sell books. Um, nobody
minds selling books. But it's also a playbook that had a flesh and blood through line in the name of a smart, arrogant lawyer named Roy Cone, who was Joe McCarthy's protege and Donald Trump's tutor, and he showed Trump all the things that a politician can learn from a guy like Joe McCarthy. And Trump was a very able student. Let's take a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment. Be beddy, beddy, beddy. It certainly was Joe McCarthy's end, so to speak. Senate did go on to
censure him. Um, he did lose his power. He became sort of a nonentity at that point. He did marry. He married actually this she was his assistant essentially, and uh and his teammate and very involved in supporting his work, um, supporting his ideology, and as you point out, kept his letters and all the records and everything was part of keeping those private following his death to protect I suspect
his reputation. She was highly invested, but it wasn't. It was only I guess a couple of years after the incident that you described where he is, and then he has censured that he he becomes increasingly ill, he's hospitalized more often. It seems like a little of this and a little of that. No one's ever clear on a exactly what it is, but um, he is all. He dies in at the age of forty eight, really quite young. But um, the doctors say it's hepatitis, a non infectious
hepatitis of undetermined ideology. And that's fascinating because of course it seems very clear from all the medical records that it is alcoholic hepatitis. And it's fascinating that even at that time, given the stigma, there's this effort to hide what he dies from. So appatitis was part of what was induced by his alcoholism, but that's not the part of the alcoholism that killed him, and the doctors had to have been it was only Um. It wasn't that
long ago. It was the nineteen fifties, and they understood alcoholism and the effects, and they understood what was happening to him. And I think there were two reasons that they told a fib about what he died of. That the coroner listed acute hepatitis rather than alcoholism is the cause of death, and that the press repeated that, and that that's what's gone down in history. And I think one reason was because they were trying to protect Um, the family, But I think that UM and alcoholism they
thought as being an embarrassment. I think the other reason was what you said that Um, it was the ultimate stigma then and maybe now, to die of an addiction, to die of something that it looks like people could turn and say, geez, he did that to himself, rather than he had a real disease, and alcoholism was a legitimate disease as we know today. But I'm not sure that if a politician died of what Joe McCarthy did
today that would be any more candid. And it, to me was one of the many tragedies of his life that this guy who, in Bobby Kennedy's words, had been taken at a toboggan to the top the hill, was going blind down the hill, and he was so excited by the ride that the fact he was going to crash and hurt himself at the bottom, I think never occurred to him. From the day that he was censured by the Senate, his political life was over, and I
would argue that his life generally was over. The only good things he had in his life really from that time on were an incredibly smart and loyal wife, Jane, and an infant daughter that they adopted at the very end. And it was too late, and it was too late to pull him out of what I think may have
been a depression. Um. I think if he had any condition, any diagnosable condition, and I'm no psychiatrists, um it may have been a bipolar disease or what they call then manic depression, because he had such Mannock highs and he had such extraordinary lows, and it looked a bit classic like that, But there were very few highs after his censure by this in it at the end of nineteen four and it was really sad what happened to him, and we had it documented in a way that I'm
not sure, anybody, even public figures like McCarthy, had the last two days of his life documented. There was a medical orderly sitting with him, taking down every rant and rave that McCarthy uttered, taking down every word. His nurse or doctor said, so when we come along all this time later, And there were all these conspiracy theories that
Joe McCarthy was murdered, that he died of some fantastic cause. Well, unless that orderly was lying about everything that happened in those last two days, he didn't die of any conspiracy. He died of something hugely tragic, which was the d T S and alcohol poisoning and a fever that spiked too.
I think it was a hundred and seven. And we know that you bring up bipolar disorder, and of course all these things were saying, you know, it's impossible, even though I am a psychiatrist at a psychoanalyst, for me to diagnose someone I've never met and based only on
retrospective information. But one would expect that if you did have bipolar disorder, first of all, the hypomania romania might put you in a position to be exactly the kind of expansive thinker and grandiose character and highly creative and verbal verbally able person that Joe McCarthy by all accounts appeared. But we don't have documented periods of inability to function at least until the very end there, you know, after
he was censured, but earlier in his life. There there are no reported periods of a deep depression such that one's functionality is impaired and one basically can't get out of bed and you know, really performed that he seems to be much more on the side of driven uh and and and doing that being said, um, there there are people who have bipolar disorder who have very little in the way of depression, much more in the in
the vein of hypomania and mania. Um. But I would have to tell you that if you saw someone like this today in your office, it would be impossible to really make an accurate diagnosis until you had treated their substance abuse, because unfortunately, the substance abuse can make people appear all of those hypomanic things you know, grandiose, aid able and um and also depressed, because the reality is alcohol is a depressant and it actually makes many people
feel both disinhibited in terms of their verbal capacities and so on, but also feel at times in terms of their mood, very depressed or fluctuating in mood. And so it's it's very hard to separate those things. And yet there's tremendous what we call comorbidity. Right, people who experience
one are very likely to experience the other. If you are bipolar, you're probably more likely to unfortunately suffer from substance addiction, UM or any other mood disorder or I guess we could also argue in the case of Joe McCarthy, you know how much of this was a potential personality disorder in other words, that characterologically all along there were patterns of behavior that were that worked for him in certain ways but really didn't in others, and particularly anti
social characteristics. A man who enjoyed breaking the rules, I mean, he liked taking risks, he liked breaking the rules. He seemed to be devoid of empathy for others, truly if they making them suffer was not something that pained him. UM and these sort of You know, if he didn't happen to have gone into government where he could be spared the punishments. He is somebody who if he'd gone into different directions, might have found himself really on the
wrong side of the law and often punished. The only place I would take exception to what you said is he did find himself from the wrong side of the law, but he was protected because he was in the Senate, and he did. I think that he liabeled lots of people. He did all kinds of things. There was a hint in the medical records from his time in the military that when he went into the medical facilities in the
South Pacific, that doctors wrote different things. And I don't know whether they were being coy in not being more explicit, or they didn't know or what it was, but they suggested maybe he's um suffering from some sort of serious depression or fatigue, or maybe he's just lazy and doesn't want to go back out. But there was a hint that something was going on. But I think that probably if there was anything they would have kept out of the medical records, it was um a stigmatized yes depression
or any mental illness. And I wish that I could have interviewed his doctors from back in the nineteen fifties, because I think they knew more than they were letting on. They were extraordinarily explicit about everything, um in terms of his physical symptoms and the just hinting at things in terms of mental issues. I think some of the clear sense I had of what motivated him was an unpublished memoir that his wife Jean wrote, called The Joe McCarthy.
I knew she never published it for understandable reasons why she left it behind in his papers. I think what happens to people when they leave hundreds or thousands of boxes of papers is nobody has the energy to go through and see what's there and what's not, and they throw it all there and say we're putting it into an archives and nobody's going to see it for a
very long time. And I think some of the greatest insights into who Joe McCarthy was were not his insights, because I don't think he was the kind of guy who would ever sit down and offer any really candid sense of himself. But she just in observing who he was, even though she adored him. Um, she was smarter than he was, as smart as I think he was. Um, she was his biggest booster. She was a true, true believer in the cause of McCarthy ism um, which they
would have defined as patriotism and all Americanism. Joe McCarthy never objected to the term McCarthy ism, He just offered his own definition for it. But in the end, um, we are grateful to them because they left behind such a record of who he was and what he did
and why he mattered and he mattered. There was a reason my book had a one word title of demagogue, and that is because while this is a biography of Joe McCarthy, it is also a biography of this strain of bullying that didn't end with him and didn't begin with him, But we can use his life as a way of understanding and battling back against it. And I would add to that, there's a concept in my field called folliado, the delusion of two, and sometimes we see
that literally in individuals. Two people come together and they're in this delusional world that no one else can understand because it's not real, it's psychotic, and but they both believe it and they share this delusion. In Joe McCarthy's time, he created this belief system right between himself and the public at large, and they both had to buy into it for him to continue the delusion, if you will, or the belief system that he had going his own
McCarthy ism. When one person breaks out of that, it ends the folia due essentially, And so can we learn from that historically that that can occur, that that a that a person can propagate a belief system that a whole community can buy into, even if it's not accurate, even if it's not correct. And I hope that we all can learn that somebody who can gain that kind of charismatic power of a cult leader of sorts uh, can can propagate some really delusional thoughts that we can
all buy into. So I love that idea that they propagate the thoughts, but that becomes scarier still when there are two of them doing it and they're reinforcing one another. And there was a very smart physicist from Harvard named
Ramsey who McCarthy invited to his house. Ramsey had been on meet the Press, I think it was, and it had been trying to take on um some of the things that McCarthy had said in one of his hearings and was being try by the press, and McCarthy felt badly enough for him that he and his wife invited Ramsey to come to a dinner party that night at his house. And Ramsey was a smart guy who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in physics. And Ramsey said, at the end of that night, Joe McCarthy
alone didn't scare me. He was not dangerous. But when you added Jean McCarthy, this incredibly smart, incredibly reinforcing person, sort of taking all of his worst instincts and feeding it back, that really scared me. And that could have become a dictatorship. And I would suggest that there was another duo in the McCarthy era that did the same thing before Jean, or during the time the gene was there doing it at home, there was a guy, Roy Cone, who we talked about, who was doing it at work.
And Roy Kone was exceedingly smart, exceedingly arrogant, a moral and he also encouraged all the worst instincts in Joe McCarthy. And I want to just say one last thing about that, which is, if roy Cone hadn't gotten the job as chief council, which really meant chief of staff, the second in line for that job was a guy named Bobby Kennedy. And what would Joe McCarthy have been like? And we can only imagine if it had been Bobby Kennedy there instead of Roy Cohne helping set the path on where
Joe McCarthy was going. Well, sadly we will we will never know, but it is important for us to think about today. Who are the duos? Who do we give our power to? Right? Who do we give over to and and thereby join their their system, join their belief system. Well, that wraps things up for this episode. Thanks for joining
me today. If you're interested in more information about Joe McCarthy, check out Larry Tis book Demagogue, or for more on the concepts of personology, you can also check out my book The Power of Different The Link between Disorder and Genie Us. Also make sure to follow me on Twitter at doctor Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy m D Until next time. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Clang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The Associate producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.