ThoughtGallery.org > Larry Tye on Joe McCarthy, with Victor Navasky & Kai Bird

Larry Tye on Joe McCarthy, with Victor Navasky & Kai Bird

In the long history of American demagogues, from Huey Long to Donald Trump, never has one man caused so much damage in such a short time as Senator Joseph McCarthy. We still use “McCarthyism” to stand for outrageous charges of guilt by association, a weapon of polarizing slander. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy destroyed many careers and even entire lives, whipping the nation into a frenzy of paranoia, accusation, loyalty oaths, and terror. When the public finally turned on him, he came crashing down, dying of alcoholism in 1957. Only now, through bestselling author Larry Tye’s exclusive look at the senator’s records, can the full story be told.

Larry Tye’s first book, The Father of Spin, is a biography of public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays. Home Lands looks at the Jewish renewal underway from Boston to Buenos Aires. Rising from the Rails explores how the black men who worked on George Pullman’s railroad sleeping cars helped kick-start the Civil Rights movement and gave birth to today’s African-American middle class. Shock, a collaboration with Kitty Dukakis, is a journalist’s first-person account of ECT, psychiatry’s most controversial treatment, and a portrait of how that therapy helped one woman overcome debilitating depression. Satchel is the biography of two American icons – Satchel Paige and Jim Crow. Superman tells the nearly-real life story of the most enduring American hero of the last century. Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon explores RFK’s amazing transformation from cold warrior to fiery leftist.

Victor Navasky chairs the Columbia Journalism Review. He was the George Delacorte Professor of Magazine Journalism at the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he directed the Delacorte Center of Magazines. He has served as editor, publisher and now publisher emeritus of The Nation, which he joined in 1978. His books include Kennedy Justice, Naming Names which won a National Book Award, and (with Christopher Cerf) The Experts Speak: The Definitive Guide to Authoritative Misinformation and also Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War In Iraq, A Matter of Opinion, which won the 2005 George Polk Book Award and the 2006 Ann M. Sperber Prize. Navasky is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most recently he has published The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views for the Industry edited by Victor S. Navasky and Evan Cornog, and The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power (Knopf, 2013).

Kai Bird, Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography,  co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005). He has also written biographies of John J. McCloy and McGeorge Bundy—and a memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis(Scribner, 2010). His most recent book is The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (Crown, 2014), and he is currently working on a biography of President Jimmy Carter.











When: Thu., Oct. 15, 2020 at 6:00 pm - 7:15 pm
Where: Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave.
212-817-7000
Price: Free
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In the long history of American demagogues, from Huey Long to Donald Trump, never has one man caused so much damage in such a short time as Senator Joseph McCarthy. We still use “McCarthyism” to stand for outrageous charges of guilt by association, a weapon of polarizing slander. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy destroyed many careers and even entire lives, whipping the nation into a frenzy of paranoia, accusation, loyalty oaths, and terror. When the public finally turned on him, he came crashing down, dying of alcoholism in 1957. Only now, through bestselling author Larry Tye’s exclusive look at the senator’s records, can the full story be told.

Larry Tye’s first book, The Father of Spin, is a biography of public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays. Home Lands looks at the Jewish renewal underway from Boston to Buenos Aires. Rising from the Rails explores how the black men who worked on George Pullman’s railroad sleeping cars helped kick-start the Civil Rights movement and gave birth to today’s African-American middle class. Shock, a collaboration with Kitty Dukakis, is a journalist’s first-person account of ECT, psychiatry’s most controversial treatment, and a portrait of how that therapy helped one woman overcome debilitating depression. Satchel is the biography of two American icons – Satchel Paige and Jim Crow. Superman tells the nearly-real life story of the most enduring American hero of the last century. Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon explores RFK’s amazing transformation from cold warrior to fiery leftist.

Victor Navasky chairs the Columbia Journalism Review. He was the George Delacorte Professor of Magazine Journalism at the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he directed the Delacorte Center of Magazines. He has served as editor, publisher and now publisher emeritus of The Nation, which he joined in 1978. His books include Kennedy Justice, Naming Names which won a National Book Award, and (with Christopher Cerf) The Experts Speak: The Definitive Guide to Authoritative Misinformation and also Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War In Iraq, A Matter of Opinion, which won the 2005 George Polk Book Award and the 2006 Ann M. Sperber Prize. Navasky is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most recently he has published The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views for the Industry edited by Victor S. Navasky and Evan Cornog, and The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power (Knopf, 2013).

Kai Bird, Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography,  co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005). He has also written biographies of John J. McCloy and McGeorge Bundy—and a memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis(Scribner, 2010). His most recent book is The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (Crown, 2014), and he is currently working on a biography of President Jimmy Carter.

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