Author Larry Tye on parallels between Trump and Joseph McCarthy

Judy Woodruff:

Former Senator Joseph McCarthy died over 60 years ago, but a new book, "Demagogue," from The New York Times bestselling author Larry Tye explores the senator's life and his lasting legacy on American politics.

I spoke with Tye recently, and he started by explaining why he chose to write about the notorious Wisconsin crusader.

Larry Tye:

The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy": So, it was a story that I thought was a piece of ancient American history that didn't seem to resonate much, until the 2016 election. And then it suddenly went from being a story of yesterday to being a story very much of today and our world.

Judy Woodruff:

You say in the book that America certainly has had its share of colorful characters, people like Huey Long, like George Wallace.

What was it, though, about Joe McCarthy, someone who dominated the decade of the 1950s in the way that he did?

Larry Tye:

So, he picked up on all the lessons of all the demagogues who came before, like Huey Long, long, like Father Charles Coughlin, and he became the archetype for all the ones who came after.

And what I think he did more brilliantly than anybody was understand the very legitimate fears that Americans had in the 1950s. At the moment that he was launching his crusade, we had just watched nationalist China turn into Red China. We had watched the atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg be captured, be tried and be sentenced to death.

And we were about to do something that nobody who's not an older listener will believe. We were about to teach our kids to do what they called duck and cover, which meant that all you had to do, if there was an atomic bomb that struck while you were in school, was put your hands over your head and duck under your desk, and you would be OK.

And that is how afraid we were. And instead of offering a solution for that fear, he offered an easy scapegoat, which was the communists that he said were behind every pillar in the State Department, in the White House, and everywhere we looked in our own government.

Judy Woodruff:

There certainly were others who made a career of going after communism, but he did it in a way that made him practically the worst of the bunch.

How so? Why so?

Larry Tye:

Because he counted the alleged traitors, and he named them. He was a cowboy who understood that Americans wanted to see something tactile.

And when he said he had in his list — his hand a list of 205 spies at the State Department, that was irresistible. And that turned him from a likely one-term know-nothing, never-heard-of senator into a crusader who may have died in 1957, but whose cause and whose name as an ism lives on today.

Judy Woodruff:

And, Larry Tye, you do draw parallels with President Trump in their styles, in their approach, and actually in the person of Roy Cohn, who was close to Joe McCarthy and was a lawyer for, an adviser to Donald Trump some decades ago.

What do you see as the parallels there?

Larry Tye:

So, I see as the parallel that, in lieu of solutions, both of them point fingers.

I think, with both of them, when anybody questioned them, they aimed a bulldozer at their assailants. And with both of them, they started out by charming the newswomen and newsmen. But when the news got bad, they pointed fingers and started attacking the news media.

It is one parallel after another. And, as you said, it was all the lessons that Roy Cohn learned at the knee of Joe McCarthy that, 50 years later, when a young Donald Trump was starting out in the cutthroat world of New York real estate, his dad, Fred, and young Donald brought in an aging Roy Cohn to be his tutor.

And it ended up that the mentee surpassed the mentor, and Donald Trump absorbed all those lessons. And I think that, every day, the closer we get to the election, we see Donald Trump looking more not just like his tutor, Roy Cohn, but his tutor's tutor, Joe McCarthy.

Judy Woodruff:

Strong stuff.

And I'm also struck, Larry Tye, by what you — what you write about people who enabled Joe McCarthy, a surprising group of individuals, many of them who didn't like what he was doing, but they didn't step in to stop him, including President Eisenhower.

Do you see parallels with that today as well?

Larry Tye:

I do.

So, McCarthy's first set of enablers where his fellow U.S. senators. McCarthy's enabler in chief was, as you said, President Eisenhower. From day one of Eisenhower taking office. Eisenhower's brother Milton whispered in Dwight's ear, bring down the bully.

Eisenhower instead said, we're going to wait for McCarthy to do himself in. In that year-and-a-half that he waited, lives were ruined, careers were crushed.

But the ultimate enabler was us. It was the American people. We're the ones, in Wisconsin, who elected McCarthy overwhelmingly to be a U.S. senator twice. And, by the beginning of 1954, McCarthy's popularity rating was at 50 percent. He was the second most popular public figure in America, trailing only our war hero President Dwight Eisenhower.

But I think that, while my book is the story of one of the most malevolent characters in American history, it is, counterintuitively, a good news story.

And the good news is that, in our long history of demagogues, given enough rope, every one of them hung themselves. And in our long history of buying into bullies, given enough time, the American people have seen through and discarded those bullies.

Judy Woodruff:

Such an important book, such an important moment in American history.

Larry Tye, thank you.

Larry Tye:

Thank you.