King's hearings: McCarthy or Kennedy?

Pete King's hearings this week on radicalization inside the Muslim community have triggered months of advance criticism from skeptics who often compare the hearings to Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts, and a reader yesterday turned up an interesting historical note on that point: King actually worked with McCarthy counsel Roy Cohn when he was a young lawyer.

"It was amazing to me the network of contacts he had," King told the AP in 1986, when he was Nassau County Comptroller. "He seemed to have access anywhere -- FBI agents, prominent senators, and the State Department. There seemed to be nobody he didn't know."

King confimed to me just now that he worked with Cohn for about 18 months at the firm Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, where Cohn maintained an extremely aggressive private practice. King didn't have much to say about Cohn, but he dismissed the historical reference.

"I’ve been surprised by the fanaticism of the atacks against me," he said. As soon as the news of his planned hearings broke last fall, "immediately it was 'McCarthyism,' 'Japanese internment camps,' 'bigotry,' ' racism.'"

King said he'd spoken to Obama aide Denis McDonough Friday before McDonough conciliatory speech on the same topic as King's heaings, and that "every factual assertion he was making is what I'm saying -- that we can't live in denial, that Al Qaeda is recruiting inside the Muslim American community."

And King has his own precedent for the hearings:

"If there’s any analogy, it would be to the hearings that Bobby Kennedy had into labor union corruption in the late 1950s," he said. "Start with the presumption that most union members are good people...but he aggressively went into corruption in the unions."

"I’m not going to be unfairly accusing anyone, I’m not going to be using lists," King said.