Joseph McCarthy and Jesuits

Dear Philip,

Your analysis is right on with Jesuit Coadjutor McCarthy.  His master was Jesuit Edmund A. Walsh from Georgetown University---the same master of General Douglas McArthur.

Brother Eric

 

 

----- Original Message -----
From: Philip
To: Eric Phelps
Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2008 12:32 PM
Subject: McCarthy versus Kennedy

Dear Eric, while setting out to verify the Jesuit education of Joseph McCarthy I stumbled across the following passage I reckoned would be of interest to you:

“
In many ways, McCarthy and John Kennedy represented the two divergent paths available to Irish Catholic politicians for success in what was still a predominantly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant nation. McCarthy never lost track of his roots. He attended mass every Sunday, built strong friendships with priests and clerics, and remained a strict Catholic. John Kennedy, by contrast, was embarrassed by the presence of priests and the outward trappings of Catholicism. He had attended Choate and Harvard rather than Catholic schools, while McCarthy was a graduate of the Jesuit university at Marquette. Kennedy avoided doing or saying anything in public that would make him identifiably or stereotypically "Irish" (although in private he enjoyed sitting at the piano and singing traditional Irish ballads with his sisters). Early on he had decided his destiny lay with the dominant eastern political establishment. He forged links to its key institutions: Harvard, the mainstream press, and groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and Americans for Democratic Action. Six years after McCarthy's censure, Kennedy ran for president as the standard-bearer for that establishment liberalism. He surrounded himself with its "best and brightest" — some of the same men, as it happened, Joe McCarthy had spent his career attacking.
By contrast, Joe McCarthy was what a knowing observer would call "shanty Irish," as opposed to "lace curtain Irish," which John Kennedy's mother Rose Fitzgerald epitomized. McCarthy was authentic working class. His eldest brother, Steve, was a factory worker; another a local auctioneer; the third a truck driver. It was only in law school that he finally shed his broad Irish brogue. The grandiloquent gesture, the blarney, the do-or-die bravado, the inability to forget slights and humiliations, as well as the drinking and affinity for lost causes: it is not possible to understand McCarthy's career without this ethnic component.
The other side of that Catholic and Irish-American experience, however, was the desperate need for assimilation. The Irish wanted above all to be part of the mainstream of American life and to enjoy its most dazzling promise, that of personal success. Success was the best revenge on one's supposed social betters. That too was part of the McCarthy reality.
“
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/herma...gin&oref=slogin

Quoted in my Jesuit-trained Movers and Shakers thread here:

<See Right above>

Passages like this one, seem to stress the notion that a Jesuit education does not quite stop during graduation time but indeed that the Jesuit master-and-pupil relationship carries on beyond graduation in a quid pro quo fashion.

Although admittedly I do not know much about McCarthy and McCarthyism I cannot help but speculate the role McCarthy fulfilled in the Fascist-Communist phony or Hegelian dialectic. McCarthy was a communist witch-hunter, but he was irrational, paranoid and the basis for his suspicions were ill-founded, to say the least. Therefore McCarthy didn’t last very long and this is where the function of McCarthy lies, I think. After McCarthy the mere mention of suspicions of communist influence in the US could simply be brushed off as ridiculous McCarthyism and therefore ought not be taken seriously. If there is a communist influence in the US, this would be a perfect cover to hide behind. Post-McCarthy era US communists simply could always refer to the irrationality, if not idiocy, of McCarthy to stave off any negative attention brought onto them by any political adversaries or curious parties. Does this sound like a plausible train of thought to you Eric? If so, do you think the Jesuits groomed McCarthy for this purpose? That is, to be able to deflect any negative future attention on the build-up of communist influence over the US?

Phil