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CHAPTER 7 The Conflictual Politics of Consensus Building III: Rearmament and the Red Scare Mr. President, I think it is time for this Congress and for the 152,000,000 normal American people to serve notice that we can successfully fight a war abroad and at the same time can dispose of the traitorous filth and Red vermin which have accumulated at home. ~Joseph McCarthy It is often said that the Truman administration and, particularly, the Secretary of State were "unpopular" and had trouble with Congress. It is true that many uncomplimentary things were said, but in Washington it is better to get what one wants than to be loved. ~Dean Acheson This chapter presents historical evidence concerning the implementation of the trade-off between the rearmament program and the campaign against domestic radicalism. The last chapter examined the identity and institutional position of the conservative bureaucracies, business elites, and members of Congress backing this domestic agenda. A theoretical approach stressing bargaining between coalitions ofinterests rooted in the domestic political economy accounts for more of the historical evidence about the policy-making process than does the realist-statist approach, with its emphasis on state actions to defend core values or conform to the constraints and incentives of the international system. Statists and realists correctly point to events in Korea as an important force behind congressional approval of the rearmament program. However, they cannot explain interests and policy goals of the most important actors in the process. These interests shaped the response of the administration's opponents to the crisis in Korea and meant that the administration's pursuit of the rearmament program would have important consequences in other policy areas. Furthermore, historical evidence suggests that the bargaining process even influenced the conduct of the war in Korea. 151 152 Building the Cold War Consensus Because the war would have required some increase in the military budget even in the absence of a broader rearmament program, the connection between the Korean War and rearmament was easy for the administration to establish. The linkage between the internal security program and the war was less obvious. It developed because it served the interests of both the administration and the Nationalist Republicans. The process through which the linkage developed was complex. With considerable help from their allies in the executive branch, the Nationalist Republicans took the initiative in engineering it, using the domestic red scare inaccurately remembered as "McCarthyism" as their principal weapon. Confronted with the administration's efforts to use the Korean War to induce them to accept rearmament, they sought to use the crisis to achieve some of their own political goals. Efforts to link a foreign threat to domestic radicalism were not new, but they enjoyed unusual success after the beginning of the rearmament. Although they may look like "hysteria and frustration" in retrospect, the tactics employed to implement the issue linkage make sense in terms of the actors' goals. The process-tracing analysis in this chapter will clarify the advantages of the domestic political economy model by demonstrating its ability to capture more of the details of the policy-making process. "It would alert every employer in America" Congressional action helped those in the executive branch seeking to expand the internal security program. Congressional hearings put pressure on the administration to act in certain cases, legitimized actions already under way in others, and helped create an atmosphere in which the FBI and the military internal security bureaucrats could pursue their own agendas unchecked by the doubts about their actions that persisted in the rest of the administration. As the administration sought congressional approval for the rearmament program, its Republican opponents prepared their own wartime agenda, which included antisubversive legislation that they had been seeking for some time but had been unable to enact. Congressional action against the left in general and labor in particular was not new in 1950. During the 1930s, conservatives had often sought to link the New Deal to communist influence in the administration. These efforts culminated in the creation of the Special House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1938. Martin Dies (D-TX), who chaired the committee , was rabidly antilabor and had called for an investigation of the CIO's use of the sit-down strike. In August 1938, the Dies Committee charged 640 organizations and 438 newspapers with being communistcontrolled and named 284 labor organizers and about 1,000 other individ- The Conflictual Politics of Consensus Building III 153 uals as members of the Communist...

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