As early as 1947, Pearson was banishing the then-unknown freshman lawmaker to a class of what he called Senate dunce caps, with a grade of “E.” McCarthy “came to the Senate with more publicity build-up than any colleague,” Pearson wrote, “but fizzled faster.” And what Pearson wrote mattered, with his eight weekly “Washington Merry-Go-Round” columns printed coast-to-coast in newspapers with circulations totaling nearly 40 million. His “Drew Pearson Comments” program attracted another 20 million listeners every Sunday night in radio’s heyday. Pearson had household heft that no other newshound could boast. From the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, his coverage routinely fixated on the Wisconsin senator.
McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade prompted Pearson to write 58 scalding columns in a months-long spree. “This writer, who has covered the State Department for about twenty years, has been considered the career boys’ severest critic. However, knowing something about State Department personnel, it is my opinion that Senator McCarthy is way off base,” a February 1950 column said. “The alleged Communists which he claims are sheltered in the State Department just aren’t.” He then rebuked McCarthy’s “witch hunt,” reporting that “Republicans consider this a calamity.” Pearson was unrelenting, revisiting McCarthy’s pre-Senate tax troubles, short-order divorces and near-disbarment.
Sure enough, he caught the senator’s attention. McCarthy’s bedside arsenal included a baseball bat and a sledgehammer, both marked with “Drew Pearson.” His violent fantasy was realized in December 1950, when the adversaries met at a Sulgrave Club dinner dance in Washington. The senator “pinned my hands down, swung me around, and proceeded to kick me in the groin with his knee,” the columnist recalled. Days later, McCarthy went after Pearson again with a verbal assault delivered on the Senate floor. While “it appears that Pearson never actually signed up as a member of the Communist Party and never paid dues … that has not in any way affected his value to the party,” the senator said. McCarthy then urged the public to boycott Pearson’s radio sponsor, the Adam Hats Corp., which quickly pulled its funding. While Pearson found other underwriters, none were as long-term or generous as the hat-maker. The columnist tried to strike back in kind, filing a $5.1 million suit alleging that he’d suffered a huge financial blow, endured major pain and suffering from the Sulgrave Club attack and that McCarthy and his cronies were to blame. There was no chance to resolve those claims in court because Pearson withdrew his suit three years later without explanation.
Pearson wasn’t the only journalist who picked an early fight with McCarthy and suffered the fallout. The senator dispatched his investigators to dig up dirt on reporters covering him closely and critically, such as Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun, whom he repeatedly threatened to subpoena but never did. With the Associated Press’s Marvin Arrowsmith, it was less about what he had written than what he might. “I know you’ve got six kids, Marv, and I don’t want to kick about your work, so I hope there is no reason to do so,” McCarthy told him. He went after Wisconsin’s Capital Times as early as 1949, telling the Madison Shrine Club “when you expose a paper as being communistic, then I believe that businessmen should never send in a check for advertising.”
The senator also had little nice to say about The Washington Post, accusing it of “moronic thinking.” It wasn’t just The Post’s writing that got under McCarthy’s skin, but the images of its editorial cartoonist known as Herblock, who in 1950 minted the term McCarthyism, which became a synonym for reckless accusation and guilt by association.
If some of this sounds eerily familiar, it’s no accident. McCarthy’s protégé, the imperious attorney Roy Cohn, 30 years later became Donald Trump’s mentor, channeling the senator’s adversarial playbook to the eventual president.
At a moment when those parallels between McCarthy and Trump are taking center stage on Broadway and beyond, the part played by Pearson has been largely forgotten. As for the much-lauded Murrow, he was late in standing up to both McCarthy and McCarthyism. The revered broadcaster assumed the senator would do himself in, the way most demagogues do. But by then McCarthy had crushed hundreds of careers and browbeat many more into a tongue-tied silence. Murrow admitted as much when he said, “My God, I didn’t do anything.”
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Drew Pearson played a significant role in challenging Senator Joseph McCarthy by persistently criticizing him through his columns, contributing to the eventual censure of McCarthy in 1954. However, Pearson's efforts were part of a broader journalistic resistance, whereas Edward... Show more
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