The other day, I was listening to George Reisman’s wonderful speech, Memories of Mises, Rothbard, and Rand (Recorded 08-02-2005). There’s a part in it where he plays for the audience a recording of a speech he gave in the 1950s at a Roy Cohn event at which McCarthy was present. Rothbard wrote the entire speech, and Reisman delivered it (he told me that he made only one editorial change, which was the deletion of a reference to God; he also thought perhaps Ralph Raico made another change; I checked with Ralph but did not hear back yet). (Raico alludes to this “Roy Cohn” speech too in his own talk: The Mises Circle: Memoirs of Hayek in Chicago and Rothbard in New York (Recorded at the Mises University on 08/01/2005).)
As is evident from Reisman’s 2005 speech, the Mises Institute audience got a kick out of the recording, but it’s too muffled to hear on the MP3. I asked Reisman for the original recording and he sent it to me: it’s here. I have been unable to get the transcript of the speech, but it’s fairly clear. Great stuff.
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Thanks, Stephan. Will we see your ASC speech up here anytime soon, do you know?
Here’s a transcript:
Roy Cohn, you are here tonight as a great American who went to Washington to fight for his country, and to the great shame of all Americans you were pilloried and smeared in as vile an exhibition as this country has ever seen; but if this be any comfort, your martyrdom is a demonstration to all of us of the controlling influence the communists and their allies still wield in American politics. There has been only one thing wrong with the famous methods of you or that other great American, senator Joe McCarthy: you have been too kind, too courteous, too considerate, too decent to realize the full extent of the viciousness and venom of the left’s smearbund that is dedicated to drive every effective anti-communist from public life. The communists and their New-Dealer cousins may have their family quarrels at times, but essentially they have been united, united for 21 years in a popular front [inaudible: possibly "regime"] of the left. As the Chicago Tribune aptly put it “the case of Roy Cohn is the American Dreyfus case. As Dreyfus was redeemed, so shall Roy Cohn be when the American people [garbled] back their government from the criminal alliance of communists, socialists, New Dealers and Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.â€
And now on behalf of the Eastern regional headquarters of Students for America, I’d like to present Mr. Cohn with a set of resolutions we adopted at our last meeting. [inaudible; repeated]
I want to [inaudible] Roy Cohn that he should appreciate this, because he’s used to [inaudible: possibly "runningâ€] and even instigating [inaudible: possibly "runaway grand juriesâ€].
[Inaudible] said, “out of the mouths of babesâ€. [Inaudible: sounds like "George"], I’ll see ya later, and you’re not really a babe.
1. Inaudible=regime
2. Inaudible repeated=Dear friends
3. Inaudible= “pray for” ?
I read about this in Radicals for Capitalism.
Of course, that was some years before Rothbard wrote the following (as excerpted in BK Marcus’ “Anti-Anti-Communist” article):
It was, in fact, McCarthy and “McCarthyism” that provided the main catalyst for transforming the mass base of the right wing from isolationism and quasi-libertarianism to simple anti-Communism.…
Not seeing this transformation process at work at the time, I myself was a McCarthy enthusiast. There were two basic reasons. One was that while McCarthy was employing the weapon of a governmental committee, the great bulk of his victims were not private citizens but government officials: bureaucrats and Army officers. Most of McCarthy’s red-baiting was therefore “voluntary” rather than “compulsory,” since the persons being attacked were, as government officials, fair game from the libertarian point of view. Besides, day in and day out, such Establishment organs as the New York Times kept telling us that McCarthy was “tearing down the morale of the executive branch”; what more could a libertarian hope for? And “tearing down the morale of the Army” to boot! What balm for an antimilitarist! …
Since I failed to understand the interplay of domestic and foreign red-baiting that was at work in the McCarthy movement, I was bewildered when McCarthy, after his outrageous censure by the Senate in late 1954, turned to whooping it up for war on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek in Asia. Why this turnabout? It was clear that the New Right forces behind McCarthy were now convinced that domestic red-baiting, angering as it did the center-right establishment, had become counterproductive, and that from now on the full stress must be on pushing for war against Communism abroad. …
At any rate, in retrospect, it is clear that libertarians and Old Rightists, including myself, had made a great mistake in endorsing domestic red-baiting, a red-baiting that proved to be the major entering wedge for the complete transformation of the original right wing. We should have listened more carefully to Frank Chodorov, and to his splendidly libertarian stand on domestic red-baiting: “How to get rid of the communists in the government? Easy. Just abolish the jobs.”
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