Despite the entertainment value, do not see Watchmen if you are looking for some escapism and a happy ending. That being said, it is not very clear what the message is, as one is expected in such a dark and dense work.

Moore has said that Watchmen is meant to be a message of “anti-Reaganism” but one is hard press to see it in the film. This alternative reality is a true bizarro world, set (and written) in 1985. Vietnam is the 51^st state after America’s success in Southeast Asia, thanks primarily to Dr. Manhattan, a nuclear physicist-turned-god/Blue Man Group member. With this great victory, President Richard Nixon is still in office after term limits are repealed. Yet at the start of the film, we see a faux McLaughlin Group segment featuring “Pat Buchanan” and “Eleanor Clift” as they debate why Russia is amassing troops in Afghanistan as the Cold War continues.

Dr. Manhattan is the only Watchman who has any actual superpowers, which include the ability to see the present, past and future simultaneously, and–coolest of all to everyone but the Viet Cong—the ability to vaporize people. The other Watchmen are simply costumed vigilantes with various opinions on virtues and justice. Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre II) and Daniel Dreiberg (Nite Owl II) have given up the crime-fighting trade and returned to secretive, “normal” lives after Nixon banned masks several years earlier. Daniel is pathetic, left only to reminisce about the old days with no desire to fight. Laurie wastes away her days in a government facility with her lover, Dr. Manhattan, who is becoming less human and more godlike and distant every day. Adrien Viedt (Ozymandias) has decided to out himself as a Watchman and has used his incredible intellect in the development of endless energy resources, which he believes will end the fear of lack and will therefore eliminate war.

Rorschach is the most masterful character, and from a conservative perspective, the only hero in the film. Vigilante to the core, Rorschach refuses to unmask and continues to exact vengeance on those who deserve punishment. His morals are black and white, like the shifting ink-blot pattern that covers his face.

SPOILER ALERT! [It is impossible to begin to analyze the film without revealing the ending, so stop reading now if you want to see it.]

For political analysis purposes, the film boils down to a final showdown between the US and the USSR, as Nixon is about to begin a preemptive nuclear strike in a clichéd Dr. Stranglove-esque bunker scene. This attack is averted when Veidt deploys his master plan: he bombs the major cities of the world powers, killing millions. Veidt makes the attacks appear to be the work of Dr. Manhattan, who has become upset after breaking up with Laurie and zaps himself to Mars (still a comic book, remember?). The other heroes are stunned and horrified until Veidt switches on the television, showing a shell-shocked Nixon announcing that the USSR and US plan to work together from here on out. With the exception of Rorschach, the others agree not to tell the tale of what has happened since peace has resulted.

Moore’s goal was to take a shot a Reagan and his politics, but this ending does not accomplish that. Moore believed that many people in the 1980s, thanks to Reagan’s positive spin on America and the globe, were not sufficiently scared of the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation. In his view, this was a message to them that their trust in “heroes” was dangerous and flawed.

Watchmen ultimately does not work as a film in 2009 because history has shown us that this theory and others were simply wrong. The obvious problem with Moore’s main thesis is that Reagan is more clearly represented in Nixon’s character, not in the Watchmen. To somehow claim that Reagan’s vision was anything like Veidt’s socialist utopia is preposterous. Furthermore, Veidt’s solution directly counteracts Nixon/Reagan’s mutually assured destruction strategy, so to draw them together is a reach.

In fact, it is better to juxtapose them and recognize that Moore must sympathize with Veidt. Other reviewers have suggested that the over-the-top criticisms of socialism serve as laugh lines directed at Rush Limbaugh, while others on the far left see the actions of Veidt as heroic and being the main point and message to the viewer. The socialist agenda of Veidt is exposed in that so long as peace is established, the ends justify the means. This has been repeated throughout the last century in the USSR, Cambodia, and the like, and all have failed. Peace is only accomplished my “peace-making”—a good code word for war and death.

Other political realities expose several flaws as well. “Pat Buchanan” points out early in the film that Russia will not dare attack because of the deterrent threat of Dr. Manhattan. As usual, Buchanan is spot on: It is only when Dr. Manhattan leaves for Mars that the Soviets begin to challenge America. This only serves to prove the nuclear deterrence theory of Reagan and others, not discredit it.

Furthermore, the idea that peace would reign and the world would unite because of a horrific attack is something that has failed in recent years. What type of attack would radical Muslims have to pull off for the world to unify forevermore? The attacks of 9/11, Spain, and London were obviously not enough. To look at this same false hope a religious standpoint is also apropos. Daniel believes that if people believe Dr. Manhattan is watching, they will not fight out of fear of him. Evidently, Nite Owl II skipped Sunday school the week they covered the Great Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah. Man has gotten back to this point once again, so what is to stop humankind from doing it yet another time?

The most rewarding part of the film is watching Rorschach work. Rorschach is the only one that boldly declares, “Never compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon,” vowing to expose Veidt’s plot, and he is vaporized for it. Despite his obvious psychological flaws, it is difficult not to see Rorschach as the only true hero of Watchmen. His integrity to the end it the most admirable quality, especially considering that the viewer is led to believe that he does in fact tell the story, through his journal. This also strikes a final blow against the dreams of utopia that seems to be ignored by Moore. There is nothing admirable about Veidt’s solution, or, in the least, nothing that makes it more honorable than Nixon/Reagan’s. Moore tries to discredit Rorschach’s heroism by his penchant for bloody retributions against the unjust. But what right-winger doesn’t sympathize with that? Of all the characters, with all their flaws, I would much rather see myself as the one who fought the good fight to the bitter end. Rorschach recognized that “peace” was a sham, and that evil still exists.

Watchmen ultimately leaves a lot to be desired, because of the ambiguous ending and unclear focus and message. I have no doubt the translation from the novel to the screenplay, along with the editing of the film from 4 hours to 2 hours and 40 minutes, had a lot to do with it. But for the right-leaning viewer, Rorschach provides the role of the hero that is oddly lacking in a movie about superheroes.

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans (New York: Crown Forum, 2007)

Washington used to be a nice town, the reminiscence goes. Before our own day, when “the personal is political,” time was when the partisan fighting was fierce at the Capitol, but everyone played by the rules and went out for drinks together after all the wrangling was done. This is one of the most intransigent clichés in American politics.

In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he said he had a list of fifty-seven names of Communists working in the State Department. The next month, a Senate committee chaired by Maryland’s Millard Tydings convened to discuss the McCarthy list. The committee did not devote itself to investigating the accuracy of McCarthy’s list, much less to forming policy about what to do about the situation if it were true. Rather, its effective purpose was to frame McCarthy in a criminal act.

McCarthy was set in the dock before the Tydings committee and permitted to give his statement. In “his first 250 minutes on the stand [McCarthy] was allowed to read a statement for 17 minutes, and was interrupted 85 times,” as one historian counted it years later. After McCarthy had been badgered several times, Henry Cabot Lodge, McCarthy’s Republican colleague in the Senate, said,

Mr. Chairman, this is the most unusual procedure I have seen in all the years I have been here. Why cannot the senator from Wisconsin [McCarthy] get the normal treatment and be allowed to make his statement in his own way, and not be cross-questioned before he has had a chance to present what he has?… I think the senator from Wisconsin ought to have the courtesy that every senator and every witness has, of making his own presentation in his own way and not be pulled to pieces before he has had the chance to offer one single consecutive sentence…. I do not understand what kind of game is being played here.

Indeed, Lodge did not. As the proceedings went on (and as other deponents were treated graciously), it became clear that the committee chairman, Tydings, was determined to hang a perjury charge on McCarthy.

The idea was that McCarthy, under oath before Tydings, said falsely that he had used the number fifty-seven in Wheeling. The local paper (the Wheeling Intelligencer) had reported at the time that McCarthy had used the number 205. The reporter, but not his editor, was sticking by the story and had an audio recording. So if McCarthy, under oath before the Senate committee, said he had said fifty-seven at Wheeling, he was making a false statement to the Senate—a punishable offense.

The problem for the committee’s argument was that all the evidence for the number 205 lay in the newspaper account and the reporter’s vouching for it. The recording had been erased, and nobody outside the newsroom, including those who had heard McCarthy’s speech, verified 205. Indeed, in various addresses made by McCarthy in the days after Wheeling, he by all accounts used the number fifty-seven.

In the methodological canons of evidence use, sources are best when they are independent and verified. In this case, the only source of 205 was a messy draft that McCarthy had given to the Intelligencer before the speech. Along with using the number 205, the draft used the number 80 billion to describe the number of people in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the draft was full of ridiculous errors such as these—errors, it was plain from all additional evidence, that McCarthy did not repeat in Wheeling. The reporter’s vouching for the 205 in the speech was evidence dependent on the original independent source (the draft), which itself was noncontemporaneous with the event in question. In any event, the reporter conceded to the Tydings committee that the whole basis for his claim of 205 came from the draft, not the speech as delivered.

The case was a closed one—according to the canons of evidence, the 205 figure was poorly sourced, whereas the fifty-seven number was better sourced. No matter to Tydings. He said that he had an LP of the event and had photographers take pictures of him with the record, of which he claimed he had multiple copies. McCarthy would be proven a liar before the Senate once the thing was played—but that event never came to pass. A few years later, after McCarthy was disgraced, Tydings admitted that the record was a phony.

“It is noteworthy, indeed,” writes M. Stanton Evans, “that the idea of censuring McCarthy, expelling him from the Senate, and destroying him as a political figure was voiced so vehemently and so often in this early going in the spring of 1950.” This was “the note struck,” Evans continues, not only during the Tydings proceedings, but in contemporaneous “comments of [President] Truman to his staffers…and [a] follow-up memo from State directed to the White House. Granted that McCarthy had made a lot of people angry, this over-the-top reaction seems quite strange.”

Evans comes to this conclusion not only in the instance of the Tydings proceedings but at every juncture of McCarthy’s career in the Senate as an anti-Communist crusader. For all we have heard about the blustery and bullying tactics of McCarthy himself, Evans has compiled a thick book’s worth of examples of just this sort of behavior toward McCarthy by his colleagues and other high-placed mandarins. It is Evans’ inescapable conclusion that others treated McCarthy worse than he treated others.

Evans’ Blacklisted by History is destined to turn the freighter of hostile opinion about McCarthy more than a little in the direction of accuracy and sanity, because the book finally shines light not so much on what McCarthy was up to as on what everyone else was up to in going after him. We now know, thanks to Evans, that McCarthy’s political opponents consistently treated him in a rude and dishonest fashion, examples of which are legion—e.g., a panel’s unceasing inquiry into McCarthy’s innocuous financial history, or McCarthy’s inability to get a straight answer from anyone. One way McCarthy conceivably could have “gone away” would have been for the Senate, the president, whomever, to make transparent indications that places like State were well on the way to clearing out the “Reds,” as was Truman’s policy anyway. If there had not been such progress against Communism, McCarthy’s point could have been taken, and the progress initiated.

Instead, McCarthy’s charges met evasions. The standard one was that if the FBI had not taken action against a particular suspected individual, he must be clear. As Evans is at pains to illustrate, however, the FBI’s responsibility was to pass information to places like State, not to take action. Action was to be taken by the agencies or their supervising authorities in elective government. The replies to McCarthy’s charges were in essence a shell game.

Evans therefore strongly implies that McCarthy’s opponents brought McCarthy down on their own heads. Perhaps it was a convenient modus vivendi; McCarthy was useful. Democrats unsure about fighting a Cold War could find a pretext in McCarthy to act tough on Communism in places like Korea. Establishmentarian Republicans like Eisenhower could distance themselves from McCarthy and thus appear broad-minded as well as “conservative.” The Senate’s 1954 vote of censure was perhaps an indication that by that point McCarthy-as-foil had been used up.

It is a sordid story, made the more sordid by the likelihood that McCarthy had people in his sights who really did malignly influence American policy because of their philo-Communism. For example, Owen Lattimore, one of McCarthy’s more famous targets, wrote preposterous love letters about the Soviet Union and Mao, and to the extent that Lattimore influenced policy in China (which influence could not have been small), the United States was ill-served.

Yet Evans is correct to point out that the overriding policy objective of the United States in the Pacific from the 1920s was the guarantee of a stable, independent, and viable China; indeed, this objective had brought the United States to war with Japan in 1941. That China, after 1949, became the fiefdom of Chairman Mao cannot but be regarded as one of the most horrific outcomes that could have been contemplated as the United States pursued first diplomacy and then war in the service of China’s future.

What to make of the mess that has become our culture’s memory of Joseph McCarthy? To be sure, the man deserves a fairer hearing, and Evans has supplied it. Moreover, it appears to be the case that McCarthy’s “names,” or the equivalents of them, were indeed active in number in the U.S. government through the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, perhaps still as Communist conspirators.

But here the lesson gets muddied. One thing we have learned about the Soviet Union, now that it has met its demise, is that it was an incompetent state. It was never able to deliver anything in terms of economic prosperity, political legitimacy, cultural sufficiency—anything. Indeed, the reason the Soviet empire finally had to go is that it became untenable. With prosperity again the norm under Reagan and spreading over the world in the 1980s, even the Chinese bolted in the direction of private property, and all Reagan (and Thatcher) ever intoned about the Soviet Union was that it belonged on the “ash heap” of history. In the 1980s it became ridiculous to side with the Soviet “experiment.”

It had always been ridiculous, but the policy of containment set in place by Truman had conceded that the Soviets rightly had their sphere. A great “contest” was on, that of the “spheres of influence,” a contest whose very greatness could confer a shred of legitimacy on a Soviet imperial regime that otherwise could count on none, save the residual honor of having been the ones to roust Hitler out of parts of Europe.

The odd thing about some of the Reds in the U.S. government is that they did not see how containment played into Soviet hands. For example, Treasury official Harry Dexter White was a reflexive philo-Communist and Soviet agent who did everything to ensure that the postwar international monetary system would provide generously for the USSR, but the Soviets turned White down at Bretton Woods, and thereafter forbade their satellites from joining White’s creation, the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The Soviets realized that if they even began to manifest themselves in international institutions (outside of risible ones such as the United Nations), the fraudulence of their whole endeavor would quickly be ascertained. In the case of the IMF, they would have to maintain a convertible currency, something White thought would be great for them. They would have access to U.S. dollars and gold, but from the Soviet perspective, making the ruble convertible would violate Lenin’s rule of retaining the means of overprinting the currency. White sought to aggrandize the Soviets by giving them preferred access to the international order. The Soviets, for their part, realized the dangers that internationalism posed for their phony empire and put their hopes in containment.

That is to say, the uncommon efforts that Congress, the agencies, and the presidential administrations of the Truman-Eisenhower era took to keep McCarthy shouting and disreputable were themselves a substitute for a sounder Cold War policy. Perhaps the reason the United States had to fight a Cold War for decades until Ronald Reagan finally put his foot down was that Communist influence in State and other places played a role, at least early on. Then again, perhaps it was even more an intellectual failure on the part of those whose responsibility it was to see the nation into decades of peace and prosperity after the close of World War II.

Originally published in the Winter 2009 issue of the Intercollegiate Review.