Larry Tye

Books

Catalogue

Demagogue

Demagogue is two books in one – a biography of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, one of the most reviled figures in U.S. history, and a broader look at America’s long-standing love affair with bullies.

Author Larry Tye got the first-ever access to McCarthy’s personal and professional papers, medical and military records, love letters, wartime diaries, and other files that had been under lock and key for half a century. Examining this fresh evidence of McCarthy’s official excesses, and of his surprising behind-the-scenes humanity, makes him more authentic, if also more confounding. Today, every schoolchild in America is introduced to Joe McCarthy, but generally as a caricature, and their parents and grandparents recall the senator mainly with catch phrases like witch hunter or with a single word: evil. The newly disclosed records let us shave away the myths and understand how the junior senator from Grand Chute rose to become powerful enough not just to intimidate Dwight Eisenhower, our most popular postwar president, but to provoke senators and others to take their own lives. Pulling open the curtain, Tye reveals Senator McCarthy as neither the Genghis Kahn his enemies depicted, nor the Joan of Arc rendered by friends.

Somewhere between that saint and sinner lies the real man. He was in fact more insecure than we imagined, more undone by his boozing, more embracing of friends and avenging of foes, and more sinister.

But this is more than the biography of a single bully. A uniquely American strain of demagoguery has pulsed through the nation’s veins from its founding days. Although Senator McCarthy’s drastic tactics and ethical indifference make him an extraordinary case, he was hardly an original. He owed much to a lineup of zealots and dodgers who preceded him – from Huey “The Kingfish” Long to Boston’s “Rascal King” mayor James Michael Curley and Michigan’s Jew-baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin – and McCarthy in turn became the exemplar for nearly all the bullies who followed. Alabama Governor George Wallace, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke tapped the McCarthy model, appealing to their countrymen’s simmering fears of imagined subversions even as they tried to escape the label of McCarthyism. All had big plans and glorified visions in which they played the crowning roles.

As gut-wrenching as their tales are, McCarthy and his fellow firebrands offer a heartening message at a moment when we are desperate for one: every one of those autocrats – Curley and Wallace, Coughlin and McCarthy – fell even faster than they rose, once America saw through them and reclaimed its better self. Given the rope, most demagogues eventually hang themselves.


Articles and Broadcasts
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Bobby Kennedy
Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon traces RFK's transformation from cold warrior to progressive knight. Seen by many as the most authentic political leader in modern American history, Bobby was a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and an uncommon optimist in an age of political distrust. But his crusade for president in 1968 was tragically cut short, leaving us to wonder what might have been.
Purchase Online
Superman
Superman is the first full-fledged biography not just of the Man of Steel, but of the visionary writers and artists, publishers and performers, who kept aloft the red-and-blue-clad icon through eight decades and counting. Larry Tye shows us how Superman, like few other mythical characters before or since, has evolved in a way that offers a Rorschach test of his changing times and our highest aspirations.
Purchase Online
Satchel
Leroy “Satchel” Paige was the most sensational pitcher ever to throw a baseball. During his years in the Negro Leagues he fine-tuned a pitch so scorching that catchers tried to soften the sting by cushioning their gloves with beefsteaks. His career stats -- 2,000 wins, 250 shutouts, three victories on the same day -- are so eye-popping they seem like misprints. But bigotry kept big league teams from signing him until he was forty-two, at which point he helped propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. Over a career that spanned four decades, Satchel pitched more baseballs, for more fans, in more ballparks, for more teams, than any player in history.
Purchase Online
Shock
Shock is two stories in one. The first half is Kitty Dukakis’ 20-year battle against depression, along with alcohol and drug addictions. She tried every medication and treatment available, but it was not until she got electroconvulsive therapy that she could reclaim her life. In the other half of the book, Larry Tye looks at the science behind ECT and its dramatic yet subterranean comeback. Shock shows how ECT offers a better chance of overcoming depression and other disabling mental illnesses than the best antidepressant or therapy, but it also talks about memory loss and other potential risks.
Purchase Online
Rising From The Rails
Pullman porters held the worst job on the train and the best in the black community for the 100 years they worked on George Pullman’s sleeping cars. They launched the first successful black trade union and helped fuel the civil rights movement. Yet as Rising from the Rails shows, porters’ most lasting legacy was giving birth to children and grandchildren who run America’s cities and states, sit on corporate and editorial boards, number among this country’s leading professors, doctors and lawyers, and form the core of today’s African-American middle class.
Purchase Online
Homelands
Home Lands tells the stories of seven far-flung Jewish communities from Boston to Buenos Aires, Dusseldorf to Dnepropetrovsk deep in the Ukraine. Together they make up a renewed diaspora. It is a world of reawakening, where children are leading parents and grandparents back to their culture and faith. This new Jewish diaspora, Home Lands makes clear, is no mere curiosity of history, but rather the reality of today and tomorrow.
Purchase Online
Father Of Spin
Edward L. Bernays sold American women on smoking cigarettes. He made Ivory the all-American soap and helped make Calvin Coolidge president. This nephew of Sigmund Freud borrowed his uncle’s ideas on why people behave as they do, then used those ideas to make people behave the ways his clients wanted. In the process, Father of Spin tells us, Bernays helped shape America’s commercial choices and define our political discourse.
Purchase Online

Reviews of DEMAGOGUE

“Larry Tye’s Demagogue nails the defining biography of Joe McCarthy. I grew up a Cold War kid watching it all on television. I thought I knew it all, but Tye makes it real. To understand Donald Trump, you have to understand Joe McCarthy first, and Tye’s your guide.”
John Kerry, former US Secretary of State
“Tye has written a fabulous, can't-put-down examination of one of the most dangerous politicians in American history. But Demagogue is more than a biography—it's a warning of the peril we are facing.”
William Cohen, former US Secretary of Defense
“Tye takes us, step by step, as one of America’s most dangerous right-wing populists learns how to use fear and deception to vault his way into power and threaten our country’s most basic rights. The lessons for today are all too clear.”
Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die
“In an age when we see the resurrection of Senator Joe McCarthy’s tactics — exaggeration and lies, guilt by association, the smearing of political opponents, and above all the acquiescence of enablers who know better — Larry Tye’s DEMAGOGUE is a gripping, essential read. Drawing on records newly unsealed after sixty years, Tye explains how McCarthy’s fear-mongering caught fire, offering timely insight into the rise of bullies and what is required to defeat them.”
Samantha Power, former US ambassador to the United Nations and New York Times bestselling author of The Education of an Idealist
“Joe McCarthy showed us how dangerous a demagogue could be to our democracy without being president. As the demagogue now in the Oval Office--mentored personally by McCarthy's unscrupulous disciple Roy Cohn--asserts monarchical authority, it has never been more urgent to have Larry Tye's definitive answers to the questions: How did Joe McCarthy get power in America? And how was he brought down?"
Daniel Ellsbergnuclear defense analyst and author of The Doomsday Machine
“This well-crafted, deeply researched, study of Joseph McCarthy and ‘McCarthyism’ reveals the awful consequences of demagoguery in America, and its toll on our democracy. In writing the definitive account of Senator Joe McCarthy, longtime journalist Larry Tye has provided more than untold history, but also an essential primer for the times of Trump, as America experiences another authoritarian personality who has gained an outsized hold on the Republican Party. We cannot ignore the lessons revealed in Larry Tye’s narrative."
John W. Deanformer Nixon White House Counsel
“Larry Tye's deeply reported Demagogue accomplishes two essential tasks at once. As first-rate biographies do, it lifts Joe McCarthy from stereotype to vivid flesh, while also using the past to illuminate the present."
David MaranissPulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father
“Fueled by a trove of newly uncovered documents, Demagogue charts the legacy of Joe McCarthy, reviled master of the political smear, through the malign tutelage of McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn and directly to Donald J. Trump. A must-read.”
Richard Ben-Venisteassistant Watergate special prosecutor and author of The Emperor’s New Clothes
"Larry Tye's razor smart and riveting account is a timely, and dismaying, reminder of how hard it is for American politics to turn on a demagogue who exploits our fears. Joe McCarthy left few profiles in political courage in his wake."
Tim Naftaliformer director of the Nixon Presidential Library and coauthor of Impeachment: An American History
“There couldn’t be a more fitting time for Larry Tye to revisit the history of Senator Joe McCarthy. Based on new archival findings, Demagogue tells the story of one of the notorious senators in congressional history, a legislator who destroyed lives, shattered reputations, and damaged institutions until he eventually did himself in.”
Julian Zelizerauthor of Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party
"For many contemporary readers, Joseph McCarthy is a done and dusted relic for the history books, but Tye brings him back to ferocious life. '[McCarthy] asked himself only two questions: What do I want and how do I get it?' Fueled by Cold War fears, McCarthy’s hunt for communist-influenced employees . . . ruined careers and claimed lives through shame, stress, and suicide. Tye is an even-handed reporter, tracking the truth of stories advanced by both McCarthy's devotees and detractors. . . . This is a must-read biography . . . and every reader will blanch at its events' resemblances to today’s fraught political conflicts."
BooklistStarred Review
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DEMAGOGUE

Demagogue is two books in one – a biography of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, one of the most reviled figures in U.S. history, and a broader look at America’s long-standing love affair with bullies.

Author Larry Tye got the first-ever access to McCarthy’s personal and professional papers, medical and military records, love letters, wartime diaries, and other files that had been under lock and key for half a century. Examining this fresh evidence of McCarthy’s official excesses, and of his surprising behind-the-scenes humanity, makes him more authentic, if also more confounding. Today, every schoolchild in America is introduced to Joe McCarthy, but generally as a caricature, and their parents and grandparents recall the senator mainly with catch phrases like witch hunter or with a single word: evil. The newly disclosed records let us shave away the myths and understand how the junior senator from Grand Chute rose to become powerful enough not just to intimidate Dwight Eisenhower, our most popular postwar president, but to provoke senators and others to take their own lives. Pulling open the curtain, Tye reveals Senator McCarthy as neither the Genghis Kahn his enemies depicted, nor the Joan of Arc rendered by friends.

Somewhere between that saint and sinner lies the real man. He was in fact more insecure than we imagined, more undone by his boozing, more embracing of friends and avenging of foes, and more sinister.

But this is more than the biography of a single bully. A uniquely American strain of demagoguery has pulsed through the nation’s veins from its founding days. Although Senator McCarthy’s drastic tactics and ethical indifference make him an extraordinary case, he was hardly an original. He owed much to a lineup of zealots and dodgers who preceded him – from Huey “The Kingfish” Long to Boston’s “Rascal King” mayor James Michael Curley and Michigan’s Jew-baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin – and McCarthy in turn became the exemplar for nearly all the bullies who followed. Alabama Governor George Wallace, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke tapped the McCarthy model, appealing to their countrymen’s simmering fears of imagined subversions even as they tried to escape the label of McCarthyism. All had big plans and glorified visions in which they played the crowning roles.

As gut-wrenching as their tales are, McCarthy and his fellow firebrands offer a heartening message at a moment when we are desperate for one: every one of those autocrats – Curley and Wallace, Coughlin and McCarthy – fell even faster than they rose, once America saw through them and reclaimed its better self. Given the rope, most demagogues eventually hang themselves.
Purchase Online
Articles and Broadcasts

BOBBY KENNEDY

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon traces RFK's transformation from cold warrior to progressive knight. Seen by many as the most authentic political leader in modern American history, Bobby was a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and an uncommon optimist in an age of political distrust. But his crusade for president in 1968 was tragically cut short, leaving us to wonder what might have been.
Purchase aT AMAZON
Purchase aT BARNES & NOBLE
Purchase aT INDIEBOUND

SUPERMAN

Superman is the first full-fledged biography not just of the Man of Steel, but of the visionary writers and artists, publishers and performers, who kept aloft the red-and-blue-clad icon through eight decades and counting. Larry Tye shows us how Superman, like few other mythical characters before or since, has evolved in a way that offers a Rorschach test of his changing times and our highest aspirations.
Purchase AT AMAZON
Purchase AT BARNES & NOBLE
Purchase AT INDIEBOUND

SATCHEL

Leroy “Satchel” Paige was the most sensational pitcher ever to throw a baseball. During his years in the Negro Leagues he fine-tuned a pitch so scorching that catchers tried to soften the sting by cushioning their gloves with beefsteaks. His career stats -- 2,000 wins, 250 shutouts, three victories on the same day -- are so eye-popping they seem like misprints. But bigotry kept big league teams from signing him until he was forty-two, at which point he helped propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. Over a career that spanned four decades, Satchel pitched more baseballs, for more fans, in more ballparks, for more teams, than any player in history.
Purchase AT AMAZON
Purchase AT BARNES & NOBLE
Purchase AT INDIEBOUND

SHOCK

Shock is two stories in one. The first half is Kitty Dukakis’ 20-year battle against depression, along with alcohol and drug addictions. She tried every medication and treatment available, but it was not until she got electroconvulsive therapy that she could reclaim her life. In the other half of the book, Larry Tye looks at the science behind ECT and its dramatic yet subterranean comeback. Shock shows how ECT offers a better chance of overcoming depression and other disabling mental illnesses than the best antidepressant or therapy, but it also talks about memory loss and other potential risks.
Purchase AT AMAZON
Purchase AT BARNES & NOBLE
Purchase AT INDIEBOUND

RISING FROM THE RAILS

Pullman porters held the worst job on the train and the best in the black community for the 100 years they worked on George Pullman’s sleeping cars. They launched the first successful black trade union and helped fuel the civil rights movement. Yet as Rising from the Rails shows, porters’ most lasting legacy was giving birth to children and grandchildren who run America’s cities and states, sit on corporate and editorial boards, number among this country’s leading professors, doctors and lawyers, and form the core of today’s African-American middle class.
Purchase AT AMAZON
Purchase AT BARNES & NOBLE
Purchase AT INDIEBOUND

HOMELANDS

Home Lands tells the stories of seven far-flung Jewish communities from Boston to Buenos Aires, Dusseldorf to Dnepropetrovsk deep in the Ukraine. Together they make up a renewed diaspora. It is a world of reawakening, where children are leading parents and grandparents back to their culture and faith. This new Jewish diaspora, Home Lands makes clear, is no mere curiosity of history, but rather the reality of today and tomorrow.
Purchase At AmAZON
Purchase At BARNES & NOBLE
Purchase At INDIEBOUND

THE FATHER OF SPIN

Edward L. Bernays sold American women on smoking cigarettes. He made Ivory the all-American soap and helped make Calvin Coolidge president. This nephew of Sigmund Freud borrowed his uncle’s ideas on why people behave as they do, then used those ideas to make people behave the ways his clients wanted. In the process, Father of Spin tells us, Bernays helped shape America’s commercial choices and define our political discourse.
Purchase At AmAZON
Purchase At BARNES & NOBLE
Purchase At INDIEBOUND

Larry Tye