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Richie's Picks: THE RISE AND FALL OF SENATOR JOE MCCARTHY by James Cross Giblin, Clarion Books, December 2009, 304p., ISBN: 978-0-618-61058-7 "Figure One: Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers...throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern. Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same? Figure One: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find...and it's themselves. And all we need to do is sit back...and watch. Figure Two: Then I take it this place...this Maple Street...is not unique. Figure One (shaking his head): By no means. Their world is full of Maple Streets. And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other...one to the other...one to the other..." -- "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" by Rod Serling "What about his views on the issues? some of his friends asked. Wouldn't voters want to know about them? Not necessarily, McCarthy replied. In his opinion, voters didn't care all that much about political issues. How they voted depended more on their feelings about a candidate. A handshake, a smile, a personal note on a postcard letting them know the candidate remembered them -- those were much more important." I have confidence that there will be many a teen out there who will really get it. The teen who reads James Cross Giblin's very-readable THE RISE AND FALL OF SENATOR JOE MCCARTHY and then says to a friend or a friendly adult: Okay, now I get it. This is how politics works. Okay, now I get it. This is how one person can gain immense power and randomly destroy honest and innocent people's lives. Okay, now I get it. Information and truth are manipulated and perverted by those who have both gained power and mastered the art of mass communications. Okay, now I get it. Many millions of people don't even care about information being manipulated and perverted. They are so not paying attention to what is going on in their country or in the world. Okay, now I get it. This is how nearly-unfathomable geopolitical events of the twentieth century came together and have brought us to where we are today. Okay, I get all that. But then my question is this: If this is how politics works, and if people like HItler and McCarthy can amass power and distort information and ruin and/or end lives and so many people are not paying attention until it is too late, then I need to ask where the hell are all the hundreds? thousands? of atomic bombs that were amassed by a bunch of countries during the tensions heightened by McCarthy and his ilk and who the hell are the potential Hitlers and McCarthys who are holding the keys to their ignition this very minute? Yes, despite the author's optimistic epilogue about the unlikely possibility of another McCarthy in America, THE RISE AND FALL OF SENATOR JOE MCCARTHY left me feeling somewhat bleak and pessimistic about the ability of humanity to see past the perverted, simplistic, and hateful messages that demagogues and megalomaniacs continue to feed the world's masses who continue to fall, it seems, so consistently for the handshake and the postcard. I'd love to think that Joe McCarthy was a one-of-a-kind guy. But you just read here what Barry Goldwater read into the Congressional Record when McCarthy died at 48 about how McCarthy made America a "brighter, safer, more vigilant land," the same kind of stuff I heard when Ronald Reagan died...you just start worrying that that this nonsense will go on forever...one to the other...one to the other...one to the other...or at least until one of these self-deluded, power-lusting idiots somewhere in the world finally decides to ignite a couple of those nuclear weapons. Despite the fact that Hitler killed millions and McCarthy didn't, I still believe that, if anything, THE RISE AND FALL OF SENATOR JOE MCCARTHY is an even more essential read than is Giblin's Sibert Medal-winning THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER. This is unquestionably the most important and thought-provoking piece of nonfiction for young people that I have read so far this year. Joe McCarthy lived an interesting and colorful life from day one. He was a hustler. A successful student but not a gifted one, he quit school after eighth grade and became a very successful teen entrepreneur. At 20 he decided to enroll in high school and then completed four years of study in nine months before headed off to college and becoming a lawyer. McCarthy was a gambler who loved to put all his chips on a hopeless hand with an improbable bluff. He would end up winning lots of those hands and never forgot that lesson. He was a hard drinker who liked to be seen with good-looking woman and didn't marry until 44 -- just months before his personal house of cards began to fall and just four years before his death from cirrhosis of the liver. His rise was meteoric based on an issue for which he had passion seemingly only because it helped him gain power. "Once again, as Joe was quick to note, the response revealed that the media were more interested in his accusations than in their accuracy. "Joe reached another conclusion in the wake of the Cedric Parker affair: If charges of disloyalty and subversion could get so much attention, most of it favorable, why not make more of them? On November 11, 1949, in a speech to the Shriners Club in Madison, he roused the crowd when he said, 'We cannot blind our eyes to the fact that we are engaged in a showdown fight...a final, all-out battle between Communist atheism and Christian democracy.'" Joe McCarthy was a liar and a bully and a cheater, a guy who just made it all up as he went along. He lied about his military service record and bluffed his way through his career as Senator in Washington, D.C. when he challenged anyone -- including the president -- who he suspected of getting in his way. But, as they say, what goes up must come down, and Ike eventually ran out of patience with McCarthy's increasingly outrageous accusations and demands. "President Eisenhower was stunned when told of McCarthy's diatribe. According to Jim Hagerty, he paced back and forth in the Oval Office as he tried to put his thoughts and feelings into words. 'This amounts to nothing but a wholesale subversion of public services,' the president said. 'McCarthy is making exactly the same plea of loyalty that Hitler made to the German people. Both tried to set up personal loyalty within the government while both were using the pretense of fighting Communism. "'McCarthy is trying deliberately to subvert people we have in government, people who are sworn to obey the law, the Constitution, and their superior officers. I think this is the most disloyal act we have ever had by anyone in the government of the United States.'" Joe McCarthy spent time wielding what was at one point arguably the most power of anyone in the world. One hundred years after his birth, the whole world is a far more dangerous place for having had Joe McCarthy in it for 48 years. THE RISE AND FALL OF SENATOR JOE MCCARTHY shows in fascinating and harrowing detail why this is the case. Richie Partington, MLIS Richie's Picks _http://librarything.com/profile/richiespicks_ (http://librarything.com/profile/richiespicks) Moderator, _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit_ (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit) _http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks_ (http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks) **************A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222585106x1201462830/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=115&bcd =JulystepsfooterNO115) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Please note: All LM_NET postings are protected by copyright law. You can prevent most e-mail filters from deleting LM_NET postings by adding LM_NET@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU to your e-mail address book. 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