Censorship at Annapolis

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demanded purge of the Naval Academy library was not unprecedented. Roy Cohn pulled the same stunt in 1953, at the behest of his boss, Joe McCarthy, at State Department libraries across Europe. There is one big difference, however, although it is not very encouraging, as I explain in my new column for The Hill.

Here is the gist:

Hegseth’s ‘Big Brother’ book purge models the worst of McCarthyism 

by Steven Lubet, opinion contributor

The U.S. Naval Academy has had a library since the day it was founded in Annapolis, Md. in 1845. Its history had been one of steady expansion and wide inclusion until last month, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the removal of suspect books. 

Hegseth was not the first Republican figure to demand a library purge. That was the disgraced Roy Cohn, Sen. Joe McCarthy’s henchman and President Trump’s early mentor. 

Hegseth was, however, the first to insist that future military officers could be harmed by exposure to the wrong books. In fact, the most famous five-star general in U.S. history once took a decidedly contrary view. 

McCarthy himself promised to “pin down” those who were “directly responsible” for “placing the U.S. stamp of approval on a vast number of well-known Communist authors.” Predating Hegseth by 72 years, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles ordered the removal of many books “stocked in our libraries throughout the world.”  

In the meantime, Hegseth has earned for himself perhaps the best-known rebuke from the McCarthy era: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

You can read the entire essay at The Hill.