As I explained in my most recent Substack newsletter, my father’s political history as a Washington based reporter from 1946 until his death in 1974 was one that didn’t particularly interest the fiction writer in me. I focused instead on the emotional and psychological currents inside our immediate family surrounded as we were by the secrecy and threats of the Cold War. However lately, as unsettling news continues to pour out of our capital city under this administration, I am reminded of stories my father told about Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.

When on February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy, (R-Wisc.) first charged in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia that the State Department was riddled with Communists, my uncle Joe was reporting from abroad, so it fell to my father to respond. Less than a month later on March 5, 1950, he started off by describing McCarthy as “the big, raw-boned pride and joy of the real estate lobby” in “Matter of Fact,” the Alsop brothers’ weekly column for the Herald Tribune. He went on to suggest that “Responsible officials in the State Department are confident…McCarthy will get his head so thoroughly washed that neither he nor any of his like-minded colleagues will soon again use this particular vote-catching technique.” They were right in the end, but the process took far longer than they thought it would and destroyed far more lives than anybody could have imagined.

Born in 1948, I was too young to remember the televised hearings or to read any of my father’s columns until decades later. I learned much of what I know of my father’s career from two biographies, The Georgetown Set by Gregg Herken and Taking on the World by Robert Merry. These two historians interviewed me and other family members about what life was like inside our family while they focused on the circles the Alsop brothers moved in and the ways their writing affected policy in the United States and abroad.

On July 29, 1950, my father and uncle published a piece in the Saturday Evening Post, titled “Why Has Washington Gone Crazy?” A sentence in the second paragraph sounds as if it could have been written today. “A miasma of neurotic fear and internal suspicion is seeping over the nation’s capital like some noxious effluvium from the marshy Potomac.” They go on to write that “no man is safe anymore from the lies of vote-grubbing politicians…” Although they devote only one paragraph to a description of McCarthy in his “lair” on Capitol Hill, it is an unflattering portrait that continued to enrage the Wisconsin senator long after its publication. One line gives the reader a flavor of the piece. “McCarthy himself, despite a creeping baldness and a continual tremor which makes his head shake in a disconcerting fashion, is reasonably well cast as the Hollywood version of a strong-jawed private eye.”

In The Center: The Anatomy of Power in Washington (1968), my father tells a chilling story of an encounter he and my mother witnessed from the Senate Gallery. Standing behind a lectern piled with documents, Senator McCarthy was giving one of his long, now familiar, speeches about the number of Communists operating in the State Department. He announced that any senator who wished to examine the evidence was free to do so. However, when Senator Herbert Lehman (D-NY) rose from his seat and approached the podium with his hand outstretched, the two men stared at one another for a long moment until McCarthy burst into one of “his strange, rather terrifying giggle(s)” my father wrote. And when Lehman looked around the Senate floor for support, nobody met his eye and not a man rose to back him up. Not one. “Go back to your seat, old man,” McCarthy muttered. At that point in the gallery, my father leaned over to my mother and said, “There goes the end of the Republic.”

I remember only one story my father told at the dinner table about his own interactions with the senator from Wisconsin. Once again, Daddy had been sitting in the Senate gallery making notes on a speech McCarthy was giving on the floor in which he railed on about a number of people, including the Alsop brothers, who he considered to be traitors as they were soft on Communism. The Senator left the floor and Daddy continued to scribble in his notebook. With no warning, somebody clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hi, Stew.” My father turned around with his hand outstretched to find Joe McCarthy grinning in his face. Daddy told us that he snatched his hand back as if it were about to be bitten by a snake.

My father died in May of 1974, the month the impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon were convened in the House of Representatives. When people ask me these days what my father would say about the current political situation in Washington, I am reminded of something he wrote at the very end of his memoir Stay of Execution. “For weeks now, I have been haunted and depressed by a sense that the American system… is falling apart; by a sense that we are a failed nation, a failed people. And Watergate is surely a peculiarly depressing way to say farewell to all our greatness. It is a whimper - a sleazy little whimper, a grubby little whimper - rather than a bang.”

I am glad he didn’t live long enough to see what we’ve come to now.