Lawfare Daily: McCarthyism and Its Echoes in Modern Politics with Clay Risen

[Intro]

Clay Risen: What is the line between national security and individual rights in a context, when you know that people are going to abuse that line and it's going to be taken advantage of in a very dangerous way? So, you know, and I, I think the Red Scare is an example of where we really failed to do that as a country.

Renee DiResta: It’s the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Renee DiResta, contributing editor at Lawfare and Associate Research Professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. I am here with Clay Risen, author of the book Red Scare.

Clay Risen: The bigger impact, I think is just on civil liberties generally and the freedom of speech. So many people just decided that it wasn't a good idea to take certain positions, and that meant a lot if you were a teacher or someone in a position of influence on the rest of the public, but also just if you were an everyday person.

Social discourse, political discourse suffered greatly in the 1950s.

Renee DiResta: We’re gonna talk about a bunch of things, primarily McCarthyism, its connection to the present, and also to Clay's excellent book.

[Main Podcast]

I wanna start with just you, I guess you have a fascinating background. You live in New York, you write for the New York Times, you grew up in Nashville, you are at the New York Times, you're on the obituary's desk. I feel like we have to start there.

Clay Risen: Why not?

Renee DiResta: Just for a second, just, just tell us a little bit about that.

Clay Risen: Yeah, I mean, it's it's a great job. I've been here, been doing it for about a little over four years and every day's, every assignment's a new adventure. You know, I've learned more on this job than any other job because one day I write about a historian and the next day about a carnival performer and the next day about a business leader. And it's just one new world after the next.

It's actually great training for writing popular history. Or for general interest history, because you really have to be able to do these little sketches of characters very quickly. You know, how do you explain someone in a short bit that makes them compelling?

You know, in my book, there's no main character. They're just a bunch of somewhat main characters, and so being able to sort of explain real quickly why they matter is a challenge. So, writing obits has been a great, great part of that.

Renee DiResta: How many, how many of people have pre-written drafted obits? Is that like a very, very small number or

Clay Risen: Yeah, we have about 2000, which sounds like a lot, but you know, we probably publish well over that every year.

So, there are obits for everybody. You'd expect there are lots of obits for maybe some people you wouldn't expect. And then every once in a while there are obits for people that you, I don't know, you think we would have ready and they've fallen through the cracks. So that, you know, that happens too.

Renee DiResta: And so prior to “Red Scare,” you have written several other books. You have an incredible collection of books about whiskey. So -

Clay Risen: Yes

Renee DiResta: You have “The Impossible Collection of Whiskey,” “Single Malt: A Guide to the Whiskies of Scotland,” the spirit's bestseller, “American Whiskey, Bourbon and Rye: A Guide to the Nation's Favorite Spirit,” that is now in its sixth printing with more than a hundred thousand copies sold, the Bible on American whiskey. I think we're gonna return to that at the end of the pod when we will need a drink. You can make some suggestions to people on how we should be thinking about whiskey then maybe.

Then maybe, but outside of the spirits category, in addition to “Red Scare” you've also written “The Crowded Hour: Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century,” “A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination,” and “The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act.”

So you have not shied away from some very, very tough topics and major historical moments, and I'm curious what drew you to the topic of the Red Scare for this latest one.

Clay Risen: Yeah, you know, it was in part personal. My grandfather was an FBI agent and I grew up hearing his stories about doing loyalty investigations and background checks and you know, for him, and these are kind of funny anecdotes that you would tell. But it sort of stuck with me that, you know, there were people who really didn't need to have their backgrounds investigated being looked into by the FBI.

And I don't know, that was, that was always interesting to me. And so that kind of, I often, when I write a book, I look for, you know, something, some kernel that can really animate me in my personal life. And then, you know, I've written other books, not the “Rough Riders” book, but certainly my others where the Red Scare is sort of in the background and not even, it may never be explicitly there.

But, you know, I wrote a book about the Civil Rights Act and, you know, hanging behind the Civil Rights movement was this accusation of being communist. And there, you know, that Martin Luther King was a communist and this was, there was always you know, a line over which leaders could not go because the FBI was always after them. And, and so it's always sort of there as this kind of penumbra.

And so when I sat down to think of a new book, I thought, well, you know, this is something that hasn't really been written about in a while. There's been a lot of new material to come out and there's a lot of sort of, there's a new book to be written and why not? Why not me? So that's kind of the genesis and, and then it just kind of went from there.

Renee DiResta: And, you know, you opened by describing that there had been actually what, what we might call the first Red Scare and the second Red Scare, right? There's this period of time after World War I, and then there's the period that I think the average reader might be a little bit more familiar with McCarthyism, the period in the late fifties.

What, what happens a little bit later? Why don't you maybe contextualize for the reader what we should think of as the Red Scare, how you describe it in the book?

Clay Risen: Yeah. So really the Red Scare starts pretty soon after the end of World War. I date it from early 1946 when the House Un-American Activities Committee really got, really got going as a permanent committee.

And, you know, it had, it had been approved, but in early ’46 is when it really started going after people. And, you know, issuing its first, you know, hard subpoenas first contempt of Congress charges came out then and, and it really snowballed from there.

There are a lot of things that people know about with regards to the Red Scare, but maybe they don't know the chronology. So it wasn't long after that that they went after Hollywood. And the Hollywood 10 famously had their hearings. That was in 1947. The Hiss Chambers affair started soon after that. And so it all, you know, kind of snowballs. And so by the time McCarthy comes around in 1950, it was really in full, full bore.

But you know, the, there are kind of two aspects too. There's, there's the Red Scare that's happening from that point in Hollywood and in Washington and, and there's also a grassroots Red Scare. It's, these are linked close together, but it, it took a while for, you know, the kind of ‘reds under the bed’ sentiment to, to come along.

And that really was after the Soviet Union got a nuclear bomb. And really once the Korean War started, you know, where people really started having what they felt like were really legitimate fears of World War III.

Renee DiResta: We have, I think the, the sort of domestic tension you have the social conservatives facing off against the progressives of the New Deal. And then you have the kind of the very sudden onset of the Cold War, right? And the right, as you mentioned, right, this, this nuclear, all of a sudden the fear of a nuclear conflict and the all consuming demand for loyalty that that brings. And so you have these two kind of domestic and then global tensions colliding, and that's the sort of historical, I think, environment that we're operating in.

Can you maybe discuss the Alger Hiss case and, and just kind of help the reader understand the significance of it?

Clay Risen: Yeah, sure. So the FBI had been, it had been focusing its approach and its investigations into communist espionage. It had kind of dragged its feet or had not been encouraged to pursue the issue for a while. And then after the war, it really, Hoover really started to feel like he had the capacity, he had the approval and the capital to go after communism. And they started you know, really digging into leads that had been sitting around for a while.

And there was, there had already been pretty strong evidence that Alger Hiss had been, had been a spy. And you know, from there, it snowballed to the point where they brought a couple of witnesses, Elizabeth Bentley was the first, and then very famously, Whitaker Chambers, who had been a Soviet spy and then turned. He appeared before Congress and named Hiss as not just a spy, but as a significant spy.

And Hiss appeared the next day, said, I deny it. And the two went back and forth like that, and it was front page news and, and finally spilled into the courts because Chambers repeated his accusations outside of the Congress so that Hiss could sue him. And then once Chambers was sued, he pushed back and said, you know, I actually have evidence not just that he was a communist, but he, he was actually a spy, right? He was, he was very much in the thick of this. And that's the famous ‘Pumpkin Papers’ that he had hidden away. And then that led to a court trial. Not the slander trial against Chambers, but an actual perjury trial against Hiss. And Hiss ended up losing that and going to jail for it.

Renee DiResta: There were a lot of these really fascinating moments of accusation and denouncement, and that's the, the dynamic that we see happening over and over again throughout, throughout House Un-American Activities Committee, throughout McCarthyism for a period of several decades.

Some that, that, that go this direction, some that go the direction of very little evidence, in fact where the accusation is in fact enough. How do you, how do you think about the, the, I guess maybe the relative volume of those two things and the dynamic that accusation versus evidence or lack thereof, the way in which expectation versus reality shapes public discourse about the topic at the time?

Clay Risen: Yeah, no, that's a good question and it's something that I tried really hard to balance in my book because on the one hand there, there was something there, you know, there really were spies and -

Renee DiResta: A couple of ’em

Clay Risen: Yeah, a couple of them. And, you know, the Communist Party of the United States really was at the leadership level, you know, a bad actor in American politics. And so there were were reason, and this was in the context of the Cold War, so there were real reasons for concern.

And the difficulty though is that the tools that were used to go after those people were also then used to go after perfectly innocent people and to kind of lower the bar for what it meant to be considered a, a loyalty threat. And so that people who had had perfectly innocent, if unpopular opinions and had expressed themselves maybe in ways that didn't fit the moment, but were not illegal, they came under attack and it became possible to get fired from a job with the federal government simply on hearsay, for example.

And, you know, hearsay that you didn't get to challenge and often that you didn't know the details of because it was secret to the FBI. And so, you know, the tension, I'd guess then in the book is to say, well, both of these are true. Right? And then, so how do you balance one versus the other? And what is the lying between national security and individual rights in a context when you know that people are going to abuse that line and it's going to be taken advantage of in a very dangerous way.

So, you know, and I, I think the Red Scare is an example of where we really failed to do that as a country and essentially gave carte blanche to people who very, you know, like McCarthy, who very obviously were out there to abuse the moment and and to go after political enemies.

Renee DiResta: You write about the hunt. One of the things I liked about the book is, you know, I, I wrote for Lawfare recently, a pretty long essay on House Un-American Activities Committee after my own experience dealing with the Weaponization Committee.

Clay Risen: Yeah, it was a good piece.

Renee DiResta: Thank you. And what I was interested in was you know, you, you focus on this history that a lot of people, at least they recognize the name, they remember McCarthy, right? Because he was such a character. And he does evokes such strong emotions. And I think people remember, perhaps people who remember their even A.P. American History in high school or something, or, or American History in college, the, the Hollywood 10.

But what I really liked about your book is that you get so much deeper into it. You talk about, for example, the hunt for communist teachers, school teachers, right? The, the encouragement of vigilantism, the call for parents to report on the people in their kids' classrooms, the, the sort of loyalty investigations, right?

So, and I think you had a quote during the decade long Red Scare from roughly 1946 to 1957, not a single American teacher was actually found to have imparted communist ideas on their students, let alone acted subversively against the government. But that did little to allay the truly paranoid, who insisted that communist influence worked in more subtle and sinister ways, and anti-communist watchdog groups emerged everywhere, some national in scope and others hyper-local.

And I think people who read the book will immediately, one of the reasons I like it so much, and one of the reasons why is I was having my own bizarre experience over the last two years, was just you do have this sense of these connections to the present moment.

When I was reading that, for example, I was thinking of some of the events at the Naval Academy. You know, there's the, the book bans, the things that are removed for being particular types of literature that are all of a sudden deemed unfavorable. It does seem like there are lessons that we perhaps didn't learn from this.

And I'm curious how you think about how people should read your book in, in light of the incredible parallels. And as, as you note, you know, again, there were grains of truth there. And then there are also these, these people that you point to, particularly some of the school teachers where there is just no, there there. And yet we're, we're repeating a lot of this again.

Clay Risen: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's unfortunately one of the realities of certainly American life. It may just be part of the human condition that we don't learn lessons from history and these things in interesting ways do repeat themselves.

One of the things, and I was always struck by the, the book “The Plague” by Albert Camus and the ending where he talks about, you know, the plague is a metaphor for fascism obviously. And he talks about, you know, that the plague never really goes away. It always sort of remains and sometimes it's hidden and we think it's gone, but it's actually living in our, now I think he talks about, you know, our, our dressers and cabinets and every once in a while pops back out.

So it's absolutely necessary to to remember that and to be able to come back and respond powerfully when it rears its head. Despite that, of course, we forget these things. And so, you know, we have to be reminded constantly. And I think it, it matters and that we actually were, I think, fairly successful after the Red Scare in creating institutions and understandings of what the proper limits of government overreach were.

Not to say that we didn't violate that line very often, we did. But for example, you know, the groups that you would've expected to stand up very powerfully during the Red Scare like the ACLU or the American Bar Association, simply failed by and large. And the courts largely failed until they, you know, finally the Supreme Court got backbone. But it took a long time.

And, you know, I think that after that we had a much better sense of what civil liberties meant in America and had a much better record on it. Now, I think we've gotten far enough away from that era that we've sort of forgotten it, which is not to say that things are as bad as they were back then with regards to groups like the ACLU or the, so far the courts, I think they've done much better than they did during the Red Scare, and I'd like to think part of that is, is an understanding of why that's so important.

But by and large, look, I mean, you talk about book banning and you talk about kind of the cultural side of all of this, and it's, it's depressing how quickly those lessons fade. And you know, I don't know really what it takes for that to come back around. I mean, people are just so willing, so willing to throw away the civil liberties of other people.

And that's what, that's what's so depressing to me, is that time and again, a country that is and purports to be, you know, built on civil liberties, we throw them away all the time and we don't really pay attention when sometimes it even threatens our own. I mean, it's one, not to diminish this, but you know, it's one thing to say, I don't care about someone else's civil liberties, but we often let down the guards even against our own civil liberties. And that's, that's really scary.

Renee DiResta: Were there any figures that you thought of, you know, lesser known individuals or communities whose stories you think might inform our under, you know, broader understanding of the Red Scare’s impact, people who really stuck out in your research?

Clay Risen: I mean, you know, I think you could take someone who you know, is not forgotten today, but I think maybe is not understood as, as a hero of the era.

Yeah, I think Earl Warren deserves a lot of credit for being the person who finally gave the Supreme Court a backbone and made it stand up for civil liberties. You know, I think he deserves, you know, he certainly gets credit for championing civil liberties with regards to criminal cases and with regards to voting rights and desegregation, but his role in rolling back this Red Scare is, is pretty important and it was an early success for him.

The woman who bookends my book Helen Reid Bryan, she's both in the prologue and the epilogue, or her story sort of sets those up. And, you know, she's somebody who, unless you're really, really deep into this literature, you'll never come across. She's not a public figure. But she was the first person to go to jail for contempt of Congress during the Red Scare.

And she was the head of, or the executive secretary of a group that, you know, was, was left wing, pretty left wing, but its charge was helping refugees from the Spanish Civil War get to safe countries. And HUAC called her in, they demanded her group's papers. She refused to hand them over and they sent her to jail for it.

Then they sent the board, the entire board of the group to jail, including Howard Fast, the novelist. And you know, she got out and tried to remake her life, the FBI hounded her for years until it finally admitted that, yeah, she's not a communist. We've decided that she's not a communist. And you know, she was broken in a lot of ways. But also she was a survivor in other ways, and she sort of had this quiet dignity that I think defines what courage can look like in the face of something like this.

She simply, you know, as you write about in your article, you know, she was one of the people who simply refused to play along and she was punished for it. And in some ways, you know, made an, made an example of. But nevertheless, that is, it is commendable what she did and, and stood as an example for other people who might follow her.

Renee DiResta: I think the political opportunism that, that you cover also is really striking, sort of, obviously whenever you write about Congress, you're writing about political opportunism. Let's be real. This is not new. But maybe perhaps the, one of the things that, that sticks out to me is, for example, the, the Tydings hearings. Right? I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.

Clay Risen: Yes.

Renee DiResta: Maybe you wanna talk a little bit about what those were and just the, the sort of fascinating dynamics of the, the Tydings Hearings, particularly the, maybe I, I, I guess I see them as the, the, the futility of the effort to serve as a countervailing force on McCarthy himself. I don't know how you see them. I'm kind of curious.

Clay Risen: Oh, absolutely. I, that's exactly how I see it. I think it’s a really important part of the story. Because, and just for background, what happened was McCarthy famously stood up in his West Virginia speech and said, you know, I have in my hand a list of communists in the State Department. And when he got back to Congress, the Democrats were in control at the time, and they said, well, look, this guy is full of it, but people are listening to him, he's on the front page. We have to figure out a way to shut him down and we don't believe he has anything, so we're going have hearings.

And Millard Tydings who was a fairly conservative Democrat from Maryland was chosen as the guy who would, who would run it because it was seen that, you know, he wasn't a bomb thrower. He wasn't a lefty. He would be the guy who was, but also a loyal Democrat.

So he had these hearings where essentially it was just, let's open the door and let McCarthy prove what he's trying to say. And, you know, assuming that he's gonna fall flat on his face and will disprove himself out the door. Well, this is that futility that you were talking about because they didn't realize the political game that was, that McCarthy was playing and McCarthy didn't care whether he had anything, right.

McCarthy knew that all he had to do was keep shouting and keep going from one accusation to the other. If he could stay one step ahead of the fact checkers and the political system, then he was gonna win. And it's stunning how successful he was. Person after person, name after name, he would bring in front of the committee, they would investigate, they would find this is not true.

And by the time they got to say, hey McCarthy, you're, you know, you're full of it on this one person. He'd say, well, that doesn't matter because I have even bigger news. I have an even bigger scandal to reveal. And both the political system or a lot of political figures, and the media just went for it.

And they just played into his hand time after time, so that by the time the Tydings Committee finished and handed in a report or a, a, a, you know, a hearing, a finding that said, hey, McCarthy's, not, he's lying. McCarthy had moved so far beyond all of it that no one paid attention.

And the other thing that's important is that, you know, most Republicans or a lot of Republicans didn't believe McCarthy either, but they were either cowed by him. They were, they were scared of him coming after them, or they saw him as a politically useful figure, right? Whether they believed it or not, they thought, well, this is a guy who's really got a number on the Democrats.

And so the Republicans on the Tydings Committee went to bat from McCarthy, even though these were guys like Henry Cabot Lodge, who very clearly did not believe anything McCarthy was saying, but he saw him as a tool. And that's another, I think that's also a lesson from McCarthyism. It's just how you talk about opportunism and you know, it cuts both ways. It's both the individual taking the opportunistic stance, but then also how other people see that sort of second order. Here's a guy doing something that I'm not willing to do, but it's gonna be to my benefit so I'll use him as he's using the system.

Renee DiResta: Right. And I think it was also McCarthy manages to use the hearings as, you know, a way to portray himself as a victim of establishment persecution. Right. And Tydings is the one who suffers the political consequences.

Clay Risen: Both, both Ty-, so this, and this is fascinating, right, because Scott Lucas, who was the Senate majority leader, he was from Illinois. He was the one who led the charge against McCarthy in the Senate. He said, you know, this guy's full of it. Let's create this committee. Let's go after. And then Tydings was, you know, his, his hitman, so to speak.

And McCarthy then went after both of them in the 1950 election. And both of them went down and, and in both cases, they were replaced by McCarthy allies. So that has a lot of resonance to today as well, and it became, those guys became models of what not to do. Right? The risks that you run by going out to McCarthy is that he will primary or he will go after you, after your campaign. And so it shut a lot of people up.

Renee DiResta: Alright, so one of the figures that we see really central to the Tydings hearings of course, is Owen Lattimore. So he's a scholar and expert on East Asia, professor at Hopkins, Johns Hopkins University, editor of the Journal of Pacific Affairs. He was, I think, known for a kind of a cautionary approach, an advisor to President Roosevelt on China, a cautionary approach regarding involvement in the the Chinese Civil War, I think it was.

Clay Risen: Yeah.

Renee DiResta: And this, I think, gets spun as him having pro-communist sensibilities perhaps, is where that, that the allegations against him emerged from. And he's accused by McCarthy in March of 1950 of being, quote, a top Soviet spy, a communist sympathizer who has shaped U.S. foreign policy to favor communist interests.

And so Lattimore denies these allegations, calls 'em false and groundless. But the accusations really explode, and he becomes one of these central controversies. He testifies, he denies it. What happens next?

Clay Risen: So, you know, he is absolutely one of the characters who is, I think, best exemplifies the dangers of this moment because he was someone who, as you said, had been cautionary on questions of the Chinese Civil War.

I mean, there was a nuanced question, right? Whether if you thought the communists were going to win, it didn't mean that you were a communist, but if you just realistically thought that, then maybe you would advise, hey, let's not support the nationalists. And let's maybe figure out a way to bring the, Mao and his people on our side, let's, or at least make sure they don't line up in the Soviet Union.

But that was in McCarthy's telling, and not just McCarthy, but a whole world of people who after the communist victory, were looking for anybody they could blame for that. And you know, so Lattimore was probably the chief figure who was blamed for the victory of Mao during the Chinese Civil War. And, you know, setting aside whether any one person outside of China could actually determine that, the idea that this professor at Hopkins was the guy could only have happened, could only have taken root as an accusation in a moment of just absolute political hysteria.

So, and, and also given that there was so little evidence, I mean, no one really looked under the hood of what McCarthy was saying and came away, no one in a position of responsibility came away and said, hey, this guy is absolutely clear and I'm going to fight on his side. The people who did know that were not willing to stand up for him and the people who could stand up for him were not willing or didn't pay attention to the absence of evidence.

And so Latimore ended up going to court. He had to fight perjury charges. This went on and on for years, and you know, his career was largely destroyed and it never, nothing ever emerged. In fact, every time the case came up, it was weaker and weaker, but because of the context of the time, it was very hard just to get all of that thrown out.

And so, you know, Lattimore and there were other people, the so-called China hands, you know, this network of State Department officials, academics like Lattimore, some journalists who really understood China very well, but almost for that very reason were, were suspect. And it's one of the great tragedies of American foreign policy that a lot of these people were either sidelined or completely removed from government service at a time when we really needed folks with 20, 30 years experience in East Asia.

Renee DiResta: Exactly. And, and one of the things that really becomes very clear here is you have this this dynamic of the, the shifting of the allegations, right? First, he's a Soviet agent, then he is a communist sympathizer. Then he's part of an influential group shaping pro-communist foreign policy. So, you see that inflammatory charges where the, the goalposts move as there's no evidence, of course to support them. And I, I think that that's also very evocative of the, the dynamics that we see today.

Clay Risen: I think you're, you're absolutely correct, and it's often, I think, a sign of when things are getting really bad, the accusations do move around a lot. I mean, if you want to, if you want some sort of yardstick for, you know, are we in a moment of political hysteria? Yeah. Look at where, where the accusations are, where, how are they shifting? How accurate are, or how willing are individual abusers to go to bat for a particular charge versus shifting to another one very quickly?

I think that's a great, you know, whether it's today or back then, I think that's a great way to sort of, if you had to say, are we in a moment of political hysteria? That's one of them.

Renee DiResta: But I think I think you're exactly right. We see a lot of that today. So we talk a lot about the, the specific targets. What do you think the impact of McCarthyism or the Red Scare was on the lives of ordinary Americans?

Clay Risen: Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple of things. I mean, first of all, there were so many ordinary Americans who were dragged into this, right?

Either because there was, you know, in some cases a kernel of a truth that could be spun out into something. Maybe, maybe they had been in the Communist Party, not that there's, it's not illegal, right? But there's, if that's what you're looking for, then there were communists, but these folks at the same time had nothing to hide. So, so there's that. And a lot of people lost their jobs, they lost their livelihoods.

But the bigger impact I think is just on civil liberties generally, and the freedom of speech. So many people just decided that it wasn't a good idea to take certain positions. And that meant a lot if you were a teacher or someone in a position of influence on the rest of the public, but also just if you are an everyday person, social discourse, political discourse suffered greatly in the 1950s. And, you know, I think is one of the, one of the lasting impacts of the Red Scare is that for generations afterward, you know, people sort of were wary of taking positions that they might believe in, but were afraid were maybe not popular or wouldn't be supported by, by the, the majority.

Renee DiResta: So how do you think about the role of media in some of this, both in contextualizing it for the public or in both? You know, we've seen in House Un-American Activities Committee media was really instrumental in assisting the blacklists, right? And in creating demand for them for a very long time prior to shifting the narrative, assisting the mitigation.

How do you think about that in the context of the Red Scare and and I guess also in what we see now, right? In the parallels today?

Clay Risen: Yeah, absolutely. And, and this is something that I, is sort of in the background of my book, but it's you know, I'm, as you know, as a, as an author, or maybe you don't, maybe you're lucky you don't know this, but you know, you write a book and it's all good. And then when you know, you later on have thoughts about things and think, I really wish I had approached that directly in my book or dealt more with it.

And media is one of 'em because I think the media learned a lot during the Red Scare became a lot better. But initially, and even up through the early days of McCarthy, the media generally, and mostly we're talking about newspapers and I guess radio, T.V. was still very much in its infancy. But you know, they largely parroted what was coming out of Washington.

And there were two things that I think really held them back, or two sort of conventions, right? One was if a politician says it then it has to be treated as some form of truth, right? It would be improper to question them. And so if someone says, this group is communist, then it's kind of, we're up to everybody else to prove them wrong as opposed to being skeptical from the beginning and saying, well, maybe that politician is incorrect, right? So you sort of give them the benefit of the doubt.

The other thing is at the time, the media didn't really report behind the story. So there was, they really only did reporting about what was out in public. So, you know, if a senator says X or if you're told, here's the backstory to an event or to a, to a group, you don't really go and dig into that. You sort of just present it as that's what the public record is.

And it was really only with McCarthy that newspapers started to realize that a, politician’s lie and or, or not that they didn't know politicians lied, but politicians lie and it's our responsibility to call them out on it. B, we don't have a responsibility to print everything people say verbatim. You know, we can, we can be skeptical, we should be skeptical.

We should call in new, you know, and, and then you know, that we, you know, it's our responsibility to maybe not report things. We don't have to say or report everything McCarthy says, just because he's good copy. You know, we need to hold-

Renee DiResta: Right.

Clay Risen: We need to hold back on that. And it's, it's, it's funny.

And there were actually some, the New York Post put out a pretty impressive report for other newspapers saying basically, here's how we're now going to approach McCarthy. And it was with these points, like, we're gonna be more skeptical, we're gonna dig behind the story. We're not always going to report what he says. We're gonna say he's lying if we think he's lying. And there were some other papers that did similar things. And it's interesting to look at those in light of today because you talk about what did we learn, what did we not learn, what have we forgotten?

And that New York Post report in particular is one that, you know, I wish everyone in 2016 had had a copy of because it was once again, exactly what you shouldn't be doing. Exactly what the Post said would happen was happening again. I think we've got, I think we as a, I say we, you know, part of media, we've gotten better since 2016, but I think we're still playing catch up to a part of society, well to an administration that is willing, that is just playing a different game.

Renee DiResta: Right. I agree. I, I, I look at those moments and I think how quaint it feels, the idea that, that that would even happen today. I also was struck even the Tydings hearings and some of the reports that came out of Congress at the time. I remember I, my son was studying you know, he was in, gosh, I guess he would've been in third or fourth grade when the, the Weaponization Committee started.

And, when the first interim report came out and just, I was reading it and I, it was about my work, you know, some of it. And I was thinking like, well, this is all bullshit. I mean, my God, there's so much bullshit in here. It's incredible. Just, you know, first they moved the goalpost and then they write a whole bunch of bullshit about the moved goalposts.

So we had been accused of like censoring 22 million tweets, just this extraordinary allegation. And of course that's not true. None of that was true. And so they find no evidence of it and they move the goalposts and then they write some, some nonsense that supports, you know, based on, again, bullshit.

And so you have these reports that say nothing, but they've got a congress.gov domain and, and then they get covered in the media. They get covered by sympathetic right-wing media, which is like Jim Jordan's explosive bombshell report. And I think like it's all just, it's just made up.

You know, it's just, and then I'm talking to my son who's going through this whole process of like, first, like what does Congress do? How does a bill become a law? And all this, you know? And I'm like, that's not con, Congress doesn't pass laws. Are you kidding? That's not what, let me tell you what Congress really does, kid, you know?

And then, and then he is also doing all this. You know, as they teach you how to write reports in school and they're like, what is a reputable source? Well, you can go and, you know, well, it's got a .gov domain, it's, it's legitimate information coming from the government.

Clay Risen: Yeah.

Renee DiResta: I'm like, no, it's, no, it's not. You know? And then and then it gets laundered into like, you know, AI now will, will process it for you and it'll, it'll treat it as a legitimate source.

And I'm like, man, we are so far, so, so, so far down the rabbit hole at this point that I, I read some of the stuff now and I think like, man, it's just so quaint to think that even as disastrous as it, as it seemed then it, it I don't know there's, there's some aspects of it that feel worse, so I don't know. What do you hope -

Clay Risen: Yeah.

Renee DiResta: -readers will take away from your book, given the present, the present moment?

Clay Risen: Oh, I mean so much hopefully. But I mean, on that point, one thing, I think that's, you know, it's important.

I mean, one thing that happened with the Red Scare, or let's say McCarthy in particular, one thing that helped take him down was the way that Edward R. Murrow and, and others, not just him but that Edward R. Murrow used television-

Renee DiResta: Right.

Clay Risen: -to kinda reset the frame. Right. To say visually the image of McCarthy can have a much bigger impact than the text, right? And that people can judge for themselves what they think of him when they see him on T.V., and they're gonna have a different impression.

And so, you know, take that to today and I think that something similar has to happen in the sense that I, what Murrow did was kind of revolution, using a new medium and, and using it very well to go after someone who had kind of mastered the art of the old medium.

And so I wonder if today, you know, there isn't, not necessarily a Murrow type, but you know, it's gonna take somebody, could be an influencer, could be a politician who just understands the media landscape in a way and can, can do it one better maybe than, than the people who are using it to, you know, nefarious ends.

And, and so I don't know what that looks like. I don't know who that would be. It could be someone viral who just comes out of nowhere and suddenly has a huge TikTok presence. But I think that's what it's, that's it would be.

Renee DiResta: That’s what it would look like. Yeah. I agree.

Clay Risen: Yeah, in a way, I mean, I guess a sort of general is that I do still maybe have some faith in bedrock kind of normalcy in America, as it were, and that, you know, things come along and shock the system and we don't respond very well. But over time there is kind of a mean that Americans revert to, that our culture reverts to.

It's a fairly pragmatic culture. It's fairly, you know, middle of the road culture, and so I'm maybe less worried in the long run of what our society looks like afterward. I'm very worried about what our government looks like. I'm very worried about what our economy looks like. But you know, as far as our social fabric, I don't, I don't know.

But I think that that's, so hopefully people take that away from the book, is that, you know, as bad as all this is, there is a certain fever break that comes.

Renee DiResta: Oh, I appreciate that. I think that's it's an optimistic note to end on. And then I did promise at the start that we would get one whiskey tip from you -

Clay Risen: Oh, yes.

Renee DiResta: At the end. So I guess let's let's have that. I'm also curious do you think, do you think any of the non-alcoholic spirits don't suck? That would be my, my one other non-obvious question.

Clay Risen: Yeah. No, I think I think non-alcoholic beer is pretty good these days.

Renee DiResta: Okay.

Clay Risen: I think that, you know, I have not had a non-alcoholic whiskey that I've liked.

Renee DiResta: Neither have I, so it's all right. So, so those, all, those all still suck. Okay.

Clay Risen: Those all still suck and I, I have not had, I've been told there's some good non-alcoholic wines. I have not had one.

Renee DiResta: Okay. But.

Clay Risen: But non-alcoholic beer I think is great -

Renee DiResta: All right.

Clay Risen: They've really nailed that. As far as a tip goes look, people ask me all the time, should you add water to your whiskey?

And the general tip is you do whatever you want, it's your whiskey, right? So I don't tell anyone what they should do, but I do have a, for me personally, I kind of go by the alcohol percentage. So if it's, you know, if it's 40% to 45%, which is 80 to 90 proof for those who are playing at home, I would never add water. Like water will just destroy a whiskey like that.

Between 45 and 50, or between 90 and a hundred, kind of depends. I'd take a sip, see what I think. Anything over that, anything over 50% or a hundred, always add a couple of drops of water because it's just a big whiskey. It'll benefit. It's not about watering it down, it's about opening it up and a couple of drops of water will just miraculously transform a whiskey like that. So that's, that's my approach.

But again, there are some people who they just love 110 proof whiskey and they will never put any water in it, and that's fine, but it's your drink. You do what you want. That's my advice.

Renee DiResta: Alright, well there we go. And thank you so much for for joining and chatting with me today. The book is “Red Scare.” It is fantastic. It is a highly, highly readable, very entertaining history of a moment that I think it is incredibly important for Americans today to really understand.

And I think that many people will find it very applicable and, and relatable in this moment. So thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for talking to me.

Clay Risen: Well, thanks. Thanks so much for having me. This is a real thrill.

Renee DiResta: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a law fair material supporter at our website, lawfare media.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

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