Here’s an extensive quote from The Wise Men. pp. 563 to 565. It demonstrates the inherent and instinctive thought of people who join the Republican Party.
“Acheson watched Dulles permit the destruction of the Foreign Service, just as he had feared. As he wrote Harry Truman that spring: “The studied appeasement of the Hill which is now going on at the expense of the best civil servants we have – certainly in State – is not only criminal but frightening.” To his former special assistant Lucius Battle he wrote, “Dulles’s people seem to me like Cossacks quartered in a grand city hall, burning the paneling to cook with…….”
In part, they were victims of a revolution of the Outs against the Ins. Excluded from power for two decades, the Republicans understandably wanted to start fresh. That meant purging even the most resolutely nonpartisan appointees, apolitical diplomats like Kennan as well as Truman’s cronies.
Yet in this twisted era, Acheson and his kind found themselves not only rejected but scorned. Incredibly, these men, who were the first to warn against the Soviet threat and were themselves the sturdiest pillars of capitalism, were cast as Communist sympathizers. Jack McCloy’s career as president of the World Bank and High Commissioner of Germany, for instance, was luridly describe by McCarthy as “the unbelievable, inconceivable, unexplainable record of the deliberate, secret betrayal of the nation to its mortal enemy, the Communist conspiracy.” The demagogue’s remarkable success at peddling this Big Lie can be explained only by resentment not just against what McCloy did but against who he was a what he stood for.
To many ordinary people, Wall Street istself was a conspiracy. Especially in the South and the West, poor farmers and common workers suspected that their hardships were inversely proportionaly to the life of ese enjoyed by the tycoons and fat cats of the East Coast. A ong line of demagogic politicans preyed on this resentment, darly accusing the “maelfactors fo great wealth,” in the phrase of Teddy Roosevelt once used to describe E. H. Harriman, of greed and self- interest. McCarthy just took the old conspiracy notion and gave it a sinister new twist. …..
As Under Secretary for Administration, Dulles hired Donald Lourie, a manufacturer of breakfast cereal. ” A few years ago he was an all
A American quarterback,” Dulles explained at a mandatory meeting of department employees, “and I think that is the kind of thinking and creative action we’re going to see.” Lourie hired as his special assistant for Internal Security Scott McLeod, a former reporter for the Manchester Union-Leader and an investigator for Senator Sytyles Brides, an extreme right-winger. Vindictive and shrewd, McLeod hired 350 inexperienced but zealous investigators who quickly went to work ferreting out Foreign Service officers deemed drunkards, homosexual, incompetent, or “incompatible,” a flexible category. They were replaced by true believers. To run the Far Eastern Affairs division, Dulles picked Walter Robertson, a Richmond banker and protégé of Congressman Walter Judd, who was devoted to Chiang Kai-shek. When the CIA estimated that the Chinese Communists had increased steel-making capacity, Robertson told the agency briefer that he was wrong – “no regime as malevolent as the Chicoms could ever produce five millions tons of steel.”
All the characteristic bigotry, myopia, immeasurable ignorance, foolishness, and blind hatred and resentment that fills us with loathing regarding the Trump administration is on display in the GOP of old. Complete ignorance of other countries, no appreciation for the norms of governance and diplomacy that hold the world together, greed disguised as ambition, suspicion of anyone who has more, knows more, looks better, behaves better……… just a small, nasty resentment that can be built into a political movement and has been any number of times in American history. Richard Hofstadter called it the paranoid style in politics. Nixon personified it, a nagging sense of inferiority, that others are laughing at you, that no matter how hard you try, nothing you do will admit you to the club.
And the sad thing is, for decent people, you just have to be yourself.
While history is wonderful to read, we are living it now. Just look at the characters paraded before us, more and more of them in perp walks. Manafort, Papadopoulos, Gates, Don Jr., Sam Nunberg, Corey Lewandoski, that horrible body guard of Trump’s, Ivanka and Jared, the slimy Russian procurator or whatever her job in the Kremlin is, the sleep-with-everybody gun nut from Russia infiltrating the gun nuts from here, Giuliani, all of Trump’s lawyers, all of his family, all of his “friends,” all of his top guns like Omarosa and John Kelly, Reince Priebus, “biggest inaugural crowd ever” Spicer, the all-holy Sarah Huckabee Sanders….. oh, and did I forget Trump? And my favorite for goofy person of the century, Carter Page.