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Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908–May 2, 1957) was a Republican Senator from the U.S. state of Wisconsin between 1947 and 1957.

During his ten years in the Senate, McCarthy and his staff gained notoriety for making "freewheeling" "His freewheeling style caused both the Senate and the Subcommittee to revise the rules governing future investigations, and prompted the courts to act to protect the Constitutional rights of witnesses at Congressional hearings." accusations of membership in the communist party or of communist sympathies. These accusations were largely directed towards people in the U.S. government, particularly employees of the State Department, but included many others as well.

As a result, the term McCarthyism was coined to describe the anti-communist movement that existed in America from 1950 to about 1956, a time which has been labeled as being "The Second Red Scare."

During this period, people from all walks of life were suspected of being Soviet spies or communist sympathizers and were brought before Congressional inquiries. These inquiries later came to be referred to as "witch hunts" by those who opposed them. To this day, dictionary definitions of "McCarthyism" include "the practice of publicizing accusations of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence" and "the use of unfair investigatory or accusatory methods in order to suppress opposition."

Early life and career

McCarthy was born on a farm in the town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin. McCarthy's mother, Bridget Tierney, was from County Tipperary, Ireland. His father, Tim McCarthy, was American; the son of an Irish father and a German mother. McCarthy dropped out of junior high school to help his parents manage their farm and later returned to school and earned his diploma in one year. McCarthy worked his way through school studying engineering and law, earning a law degree at Marquette University in Milwaukee from 1930 to 1935. He was admitted to the Bar Association in 1935. While working in a law firm in Shawano, Wisconsin, he launched what was ultimately an unsuccessful campaign to become District Attorney as a Democrat in 1936. However, in 1939, McCarthy's luck was better: he successfully vied for the elected post of the non-partisan 10th District [[Circuit (subnational entity)| circuit]] judge, becoming the youngest judge in Wisconsin's history.

In 1942, shortly after the U.S. entered World War II, McCarthy enlisted as a private in the United States Marine Corps, despite the fact that his judicial office had exempted him from compulsory service. McCarthy later took a commission as a lieutenant and served as an intelligence briefing officer for a bomber squadron in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville.

Log entries indicate that McCarthy flew 11 times as an aerial photographer and tail gunner (citation needed) and he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952. McCarthy also received a commendation from Adm. Chester Nimitz for flying despite an injury.

Many historians and critics of McCarthy contend he embellished or exaggerated his wartime service record when running for office. It has been claimed McCarthy exaggerated the number and nature of the flights he undertook and that he obtained the commendation from Adm. Nimitz by deception. Also, the injuries referred to in the commendation citation were, according to members of his unit, the result of an accident during a shipboard hazing ritual, not combat wounds as McCarthy later allowed people to believe.Morgan, Ted. "Judge Joe", ''Legal Affairs," November 2003 Many critics also allege McCarthy's Distinguished Flying Cross was unmerited and that high-ranking McCarthy allies in the Pentagon supported McCarthy's claim for the medal for political purposes.

McCarthy campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination in Wisconsin while still on active duty in 1944 but was defeated for the GOP nomination by Alexander Wiley, the incumbent. After resigning his commission in April 1945--five months before the end of the Pacific war in September 1945, and being re-elected unopposed to his circuit court position--he began a much more systematic campaign for the 1946 Republican Senate primary nomination, again challenging an incumbent, four-term senator and United States Progressive Party icon, Robert M. La Follette, Jr.

In his campaign, McCarthy attacked La Follette for not enlisting during the war, even though La Follette had been 46 when Pearl Harbor was bombed and had been exempted from military service in the first world war on medical grounds. McCarthy also claimed La Follette had made huge profits from his investments while he, McCarthy, had been away fighting for his country. The suggestion that La Follette had been guilty of war profiteering was deeply damaging. McCarthy's winning of the primary nomination (207,935 to 202,557) has been claimed to be partially attributed to his campaign's criticism of La Follette. Arnold Beichman later reported that McCarthy "was elected to his first term in the Senate with support from the communist-controlled United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, CIO," which preferred McCarthy to the anti-communist Robert M. La Follette.Beichman, Arnold. (2006) "The Politics of Personal Self-Destruction" Policy Review''. February-March, 2006.

McCarthy enjoyed the support of the state party organization, and he won the nomination narrowly. He won in the general election against Democrat opponent Howard MacMurray by a 2 to 1 margin, and thus joined Sen. Wiley (whom McCarthy had challenged two years earlier) in the Senate.

On his first day in the Senate, McCarthy called a press conference where he proposed a solution to a coal strike that was taking place at the time. McCarthy called for John L. Lewis and the striking miners to be drafted into the Army. If the men still refused to mine the coal, McCarthy made the implication that they should be court-martialed and executed for their insubordination.

From the early fifties and continuing to the present, some people have suspected that McCarthy was a homosexual, although there has never been any conclusive evidence of this. In 1952, Hank Greenspun wrote articles alleging that both McCarthy and Roy Cohn, his chief counsel, were homosexuals. In the Las Vegas Sun Greenspun wrote "It is common talk among homosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous in the White Horse Inn that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities." Greenspun, Hank. Las Vegas Sun October 25, 1952. The following year at the age of 44 McCarthy married Jean Kerr, a researcher in his office. He and his wife adopted a baby girl in January 1957Ibid.. Decades later, Roy Cohn's homosexuality became widely known as he began to physically suffer from HIV. He died of AIDS in 1986.

Senator

McCarthy's first three years in the Senate were unremarkable. Despite his initial lack of influence, his colleagues and aides considered him to be friendly and likeable. Following the lead of Sen. Robert Taft, McCarthy lobbied for the commutation of death sentences handed to a group of Waffen-SS soldiers convicted of war crimes for their involvement in the 1944 Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war. Taft had been critical of the proceedings because of serious allegations of misconduct during the interrogations that led to the confessions, as well as his objections of Soviet involvement in the trial.Herman Arthur, Joseph McCarthy The Free Press, 2000

McCarthy made a large number of speeches to many different organizations, covering a wide range of topics. His most notable early campaigns were for housing legislation and against sugar rationing. During the presidency of Harry Truman, McCarthy's national profile rose meteorically after his Lincoln Day speech on February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.

McCarthy's words in the speech are a matter of some dispute, as they were not reliably recorded at the time. It is generally agreed, however, that he produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of known communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is quoted to have said: "I have here in my hand a list of 57 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/mccarthy/telegram.htm February 11, 1950 McCarthy to Truman telegram; "We have been able to compile a list of 57 communists in the State Department. This list is available to you."

There is a great deal of dispute about whether or not McCarthy actually gave the number of people on the list as being "57" or "205". The confusion probably arose because in his Wheeling speech, McCarthy referred to a letter that Secretary of State James Byrnes sent to Congressman Adolph J. Sabath in 1946. In that letter, Byrnes said State Department security investigators had declared 284 persons unfit to hold jobs in the department because of communist connections and other reasons, but that only 79 had been discharged, leaving 205 still on the State Department's payroll. McCarthy told his Wheeling audience that while he did not have the names of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes letter, he did have the names of 57 who were either members of or loyal to the Communist Party. McCarthy stated he referred to 57 "known communists"; the number 205 was referring to the number of people employed by the State Department who, for various security reasons related not merely to loyalty but also to issues such as drunkenness and incompetence, should not have been.

The effect of McCarthy's speech, in a nation already worried by the aggressiveness of the Soviet Union in Europe and alarmed by the trial of Alger Hiss then in progress, was electric. McCarthy's accusation was seen as an explanation for the fall of China to the Maoists and the Soviets' development of the atomic bomb the year before. The exact number stated by McCarthy would later become a matter of some importance when the matter was brought before the Tydings Committee.

Tydings Committee

The Tydings Committee was a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was set up in February 1950 to conduct "a full and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or have been, employed by the Department of State." The chairman of the subcommittee, Sen. Millard Tydings, a Democrat, set the tone for the hearings on the first day when he told McCarthy: "You are in the position of being the man who occasioned this hearing, and so far as I am concerned in this committee you are going to get one of the most complete investigations ever given in the history of this Republic, so far as my abilities will permit." McCarthy himself was taken aback by the massive media response to the Wheeling speech, and he was accused of continually revising both his charges and his figures. In Salt Lake City, Utah, a few days later, he cited a figure of 57, and in the Senate on February 20, he claimed 81. During a marathon 6-hour speech, McCarthy fought Democratic attempts to disclose the actual names of these people. Four times during McCarthy's February 20 speech, Democratic Sen. Scott W. Lucas demanded McCarthy make the 81 names public, but McCarthy refused to do so: "If I were to give all the names involved, it might leave a wrong impression. If we should label one man a communist when he is not a communist, I think it would be too bad." McCarthy ended up identifying the individuals only by case numbers, not by their names.

After 31 days of hearings, during which McCarthy attempted to present public evidence on nine persons (Dorothy Kenyon, Haldore Hanson, Philip Jessup, Esther Brunauer, Frederick Schuman, Harlow Shapley, Gustavo Duran, John S. Service and Owen Lattimore), the Tydings Committee officially labeled McCarthy's charges a "fraud" and a "hoax," said the individuals on his list were neither communists nor pro-communist, and concluded the State Department had run an effective security program.

Anti-communism

From 1950 to 1953, McCarthy continued to press his accusations that the government was failing to deal with communism within its ranks, which increased his approval rating and gained him a powerful national following. During a speech in Milwaukee in 1952, McCarthy dated the public phase of his fight against communists to the May 22, 1949, death of former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, apparently by suicide. "The communists hounded Forrestal to his death," McCarthy said. "They killed him just as definitely as if they had thrown him from that 16th-story window in Bethesda Naval Hospital."

Added McCarthy: "While I am not a sentimental man, I was touched deeply and left numb by the news of Forrestal's murder. But I was affected much more deeply when I heard of the communist celebration when they heard of Forrestal's murder. On that night, I dedicated part of this fight to Jim Forrestal."

One of McCarthy's higher-profile targets was Gen. George C. Marshall. McCarthy and Sen. William E. Jenner of Indiana accused Marshall of treason. World War II general and future Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote a speech in which he included a spirited defense of Marshall, but he was later convinced to remove this passage.

McCarthy has been accused of attempting to discredit his critics and political opponents by accusing them of being communists or communist-sympathizers. When he successfully campaigned against four-term incumbent Millard Tydings in 1950, a doctored photograph of Tydings conjoined with a well-known communist was widely distributed, effectively ending Tydings' career. This election was later called one of the dirtiest in American political history.

McCarthy's charges of "communist influences" within the government probably aided the Republican Party's fortunes in the 1952 elections; it is probable that the defeat of more than one Democratic candidate for national office in 1952 was due at least in part to accusations against him by McCarthy.

McCarthy was physically violent toward his critics on at least one occasion. He assaulted a journalist, Drew Pearson, in the cloakroom of a Washington club, reportedly kicking him in the groin. McCarthy, who admitted the assault, claimed he merely "slapped" Pearson.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

By reason of seniority, in 1953 McCarthy became chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy appointed Roy Cohn as chief counsel and Robert Kennedy as assistant counsel to the subcommittee.

McCarthy's committee, unlike the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, focused on government institutions. It first made an investigation into bureaucracy at Voice of America, then forced the withdrawal of supposedly pro-communist literature from the State Department's overseas information library. Meanwhile, McCarthy continued to make accusations of communist influence within the government. This angered Eisenhower, who, while not criticizing the popular senator publicly, began behind-the-scenes work to remove him from his position of influence.

Several noted persons resigned from the committee fairly early into McCarthy's administration of it. These resignations led to the appointment of one "B. Matthews" as executive director of the board. Matthews was a former member of several "communist-front" organizations, in which he claimed to have joined more than any other American. However, when he fell out of favor with the radical groups of the 1930s, he became a fervent anti-communist. Matthews later resigned due to his portrayal of communist sympathies among the nation's Protestant clergy in an article from the magazine American Mercury called "Reds in Our Churches," which outraged several senators. Through this critical period, however, McCarthy maintained control of the subcommittee and of whom it employed or chose not to. This course of action resulted in several more resignations.

During 1953 and the first three months of 1954, McCarthy's committee examined 653 witnesses. These individuals first appeared in closed executive sessions, and their identities were not revealed to the public. Some, often those who had invoked their Fifth Amendment rights during private questioning, were then called before public sessions where their names were made public.

There were accusations of abuse and browbeating of witnesses at these hearings, though some witnesses reported they were treated fairly and in a non-abusive manner.

McCarthy and Kennedy family

At the height of his fame, Joseph McCarthy was among the nation's most prominent Irish Americans, along with the Kennedy family. Even before he became famous, McCarthy was close friends with Joseph P. Kennedy, who contributed to McCarthy's campaigns and became one of his major supporters. In the Senate election race of 1952, McCarthy, a Republican, made no campaign speeches for the Republican Party ticket in Massachusetts. Perhaps in return, Democrat Congressman John F. Kennedy, running for the Senate seat, gave no anti-McCarthy speeches, despite pressure from other liberal Democrats. At Joe Kennedy's urging, McCarthy hired Robert Kennedy (aged 27) in 1953 as a senior staff member. In 1954 when the Senate was threatening to condemn McCarthy, Senator John Kennedy faced a dilemma. "How could I demand that Joe McCarthy be censured for things he did when my own brother was on his staff?" he asked. By 1954, however, Robert no longer worked for McCarthy. John Kennedy had a speech drafted calling for the censure of McCarthy but he never delivered it. When the Senate voted to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954, Senator Kennedy was in the hospital and never indicated then or later how he would have voted. O'Brien, Michael. John F. Kennedy: A Biography 2005

McCarthy and Truman

McCarthy sought to characterize President Truman and the Democratic party as soft on or even in league with the communists. Truman, in turn, once referred to McCarthy as "the best asset the Kremlin has."

In 1947, NSA Archives, National Cryptological Museum, Venona Chronology; "~September 1: Col. Carter Clarke briefs the FBI's liaison officer Robert J. Lamphere on the break into Soviet diplomatic traffic. September: Carter W. Clarke of G-2 advises S. Wesley Reynolds, FBI, of successes at Arlington Hall on KGB espionage messages." evidence of considerable Soviet espionage activities within the U.S. government was accumulating. An FBI counterintelligence investigation Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, Appendix A, 7. The Cold War; "In November 1945 Elizabeth Bentley informed the FBI of her activities as a Soviet courier, which in turn led to renewed interest in Chambers. In late August or early September 1947, the FBI was informed that the Army Security Agency had begun to break into Soviet espionage messages." impaneled a grand jury in New York, and meanwhile the Army Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall was gathering evidence in the form of Soviet cipher decrypts. National Security Agency, Venona Archives, Robert L. Benson, Introductory History of Venona and Guide to the Translations, The Venona Breakthroughs; " An Arlington Hall report on 22 July 1947 showed that the Soviet message traffic contained dozens, probably hundreds, of cover names, many of KGB agents, including ANTENNA and LIBERAL (later identified as Julius Rosenberg). One message mentioned that LIBERAL's wife was named "Ethel." General Carter W. Clarke, the assistant G-2, called the FBI liaison officer to G-2 and told him that the Army had begun to break into Soviet intelligence service traffic, and that the traffic indicated a massive Soviet espionage effort in the U.S." The evidence from these two sources was not consolidated within the government until some time later. So when McCarthy later made charges that the Truman administration knowingly protected Soviet agents, this appeared to large sectors of the American public to be true.

After the defections of Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Guzenko, and the gathering evidence of a "serious attack on American security by the Soviet Union", Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, Appendix A, 7. The Cold War Truman tried to contain the subversion issue within the Executive Branch with Executive Order 9835 National Archives and Records Administration, Harry S. Truman, Executive Order 9835, Prescribing Procedures for the Administration of an Employees Loyalty Program in the Executive Branch of the Government * of 21 March 1947, and prevent congressional investigations, by instituting loyalty Commission on Secrecy Report, Appendix A, 3. Loyalty and security checks in the government. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Chap. 16, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980

McCarthy's various attacks on Secretary of Defense George Marshall as "aid(ing) the Communist drive for world domination" precipitated his early retirement from Truman's cabinet. George Marshall

McCarthy and Eisenhower

Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican candidate for the presidency in the 1952 election, disagreed with McCarthy's tactics, but on one occasion was required to make a campaign stop with him in Wisconsin. There, he intended to make a comment denouncing McCarthy's agenda, but under the advice of a conservative colleague, cut that part from his speech. He was widely criticized during his campaign for "selling out" to pressure and giving up his personal convictions because of party pressures. After being elected president, he made it clear to those close to him that he did not approve of McCarthy or his proceedings and he worked actively to shut down his operation. At the same time, not directly confronting McCarthy may have prolonged McCarthy's power by showing that even the President was afraid to criticize him directly.

Investigating the Army

In the fall of 1953, McCarthy's committee began its ill-fated inquiry into the United States Army. The investigation began when an Army general alerted Senator McCarthy to the story of a New York dentist, Irving Peress, who was drafted into the Army as a captain in October 1952. Peress refused to answer questions on a Defense Department form about membership in subversive organizations, and was recommended for discharge by the Surgeon General of the Army in April 1953. In spite of this, he requested and received a promotion to major the following October. Roy Cohn gave the facts on Peress to Army Counsel John G. Adams in December 1953, and Adams promised to investigate.

When no action had been taken on Peress a month later, McCarthy subpoenaed Peress before the committee on January 30, 1954. Peress took the Fifth Amendment 20 times when asked about his membership in the Communist Party, his attendance at a communist training school, and his efforts to recruit military personnel into the party. Two days later, McCarthy sent a letter to Army Secretary Robert Ten Broeck Stevens by special messenger, reviewing the testimony of Peress and requesting that he be court-martialed and that the Army find out who promoted Peress, knowing that he was a communist. On that same day, Peress asked for an honorable separation from the Army, which he received the next day from Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, his commanding officer at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey.

McCarthy summoned General Zwicker to a closed session of the committee on February 18. In separate conversations with two McCarthy staff members, Zwicker said that he was familiar with Peress' communist connections and that he was opposed to giving him an honorable discharge, but that he was ordered to do so by someone at the Pentagon. When he appeared before McCarthy, Zwicker was evasive, hostile, and uncooperative. He changed his story three times when asked if he had known at the time he signed the discharge that Peress had refused to answer questions before the McCarthy Committee. McCarthy became increasingly exasperated and, when Zwicker, in response to a hypothetical question, said that he would not remove from the military a general who originated the order for the honorable discharge of a communist major, knowing that he was a communist, McCarthy lashed out. Among other things, McCarthy compared Zwicker's intelligence to that of a "five-year-old child," and stated that Zwicker was "not fit to wear the uniform of a General." Years later, at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 21 1957, Zwicker would admit to being evasive and defensive in his testimony to McCarthy's committee.

In its report on the Peress case, the McClellan Committee (named after Senator John McClellan who replaced McCarthy as Committee head in 1954) said that "some 48 errors of more than minor importance were committed by the Army in connection with the commissioning, transfer, promotion, and honorable discharge of Irving Peress." As a result, the Army made some sweeping changes in its security program, including a policy statement that said "the taking of the Fifth Amendment by an individual queried about his communist affiliations is sufficient to warrant the issuance of a general discharge rather than an honorable discharge."

The Army-McCarthy Hearings

Early in 1954, the Army accused McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, of pressuring the Army to give favorable treatment to another former aide and friend of Cohn's, G. David Schine. McCarthy claimed that the accusation was made in bad faith, in retaliation for his questioning of Zwicker the previous year. A special committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Karl Mundt, was appointed to adjudicate these conflicting charges, and the hearings opened on April 22, 1954.

The Senate convened the Army-McCarthy Hearings into the matter, which was broadcast live and on television. The televised hearings lasted for 36 days and were viewed by an estimated 20 million people. After hearing 32 witnesses and two million words of testimony, the committee concluded that McCarthy himself had not exercised any improper influence on behalf of David Schine, but that Roy Cohn, McCarthy's chief counsel, had engaged in some "unduly persistent or aggressive efforts" on behalf of Schine. The committee also concluded that Army Secretary Robert Stevens and Army Counsel John Adams "made efforts to terminate or influence the investigation and hearings at Fort Monmouth," and that Adams "made vigorous and diligent efforts" to block subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board "by means of personal appeal to certain members of the * committee."

In a separate statement that concurred with the special committee report, Senator Everett Dirksen demonstrated the weakness of the Army case by noting that the Army did not make its charges public until eight months after the first allegedly improper effort was made on behalf of Schine (July 1953), and then not until after Senator McCarthy had made it known (January 1954) that he would subpoena members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board. Dirksen also called attention to a telephone conversation between Secretary Stevens and Senator Stuart Symington on March 8, 1954, three days before the Army allegations were made public. In that conversation, Stevens said that any charges of improper influence by McCarthy's staff "would prove to be very much exaggerated.... I am the Secretary and I have had some talks with the * committee and the chairman, and so on, and by and large as far as the treatment of me is concerned, I have no personal complaint."

In one famous interchange, McCarthy responded to aggressive questioning from the Army's attorney general Joseph Welch. On June 9, the 30th day of the hearings, Welch challenged Roy Cohn to give the Attorney General McCarthy's list of 130 communists or subversives in defense plants "before the sun goes down." McCarthy responded that if Welch was so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on a man in his Boston law office named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which Attorney General Brownell had called "the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party." Welch then delivered the most famous lines from the Army-McCarthy Hearings, accusing McCarthy of "reckless cruelty" and concluding: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" These proceedings have been recorded in the documentary film Point of Order (film).

The Watkins Committee

Several members of the U.S. Senate opposed McCarthy well before 1953. One example is U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican (and the only woman in the Senate at the time) who delivered her "Declaration of Conscience" on June 1, 1950, criticizing both the Executive and Legislative branches' use of smear tactics without mentioning McCarthy or anyone else by name (as required by Senate rules). Smith also said, "The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the threat of communism and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democratic administration."*Six other Republican Senators, Wayne Morse, Irving M. Ives, Charles W. Tobey, Edward John Thye, George Aiken and Robert C. Hendrickson joined her in condemning McCarthy's tactics. Vermont Senator Ralph E. Flanders also condemned McCarthy on the floor of the Senate and he introduced the resolution to censure him. McCarthy referred to Smith and her fellow Senators as "Snow White and the 6 dwarves."

On July 30, 1954, Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing McCarthy of conduct "unbecoming a member of the United States Senate." Flanders was no fan of McCarthy, as exemplified by a statement to the Senate two months earlier that said McCarthy's "anti-communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority."

McCarthy was initially accused of 46 different counts of allegedly improper conduct and a special committee was set up, under the chairmanship of Senator Arthur V. Watkins, to study and evaluate the charges. Thus began the fifth investigation of Joe McCarthy in five years. After two months of hearings and deliberations, the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on only two of the 46 counts.

When a special session of the Senate convened on November 8, 1954, these were the two charges to be debated and voted on:

  1. That Senator McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" in 1952 with the Senate Subcommitee on Privileges and Elections that was looking into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with a resolution for his expulsion from the Senate; and
  2. That in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Senator McCarthy had "intemperately abused" General Ralph Zwicker.

Many senators were uneasy about the Zwicker count, particularly since the Army had shown contempt for committee chairman McCarthy by disregarding his letter of February 1 1954 and honorably discharging Irving Peress the next day. For this reason, these senators felt that McCarthy's conduct toward Zwicker on February 18 was at least partially justified. So the Zwicker count was dropped at the last minute and was replaced with this substitute charge: That Senator McCarthy, by characterizing the Watkins Committee as the "unwitting handmaiden" of the Communist Party and by describing the special Senate session as a "lynch party" and a "lynch bee," had "acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity."

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" Senator Joseph McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22, with the Democrats unanimously in favor of condemnation and the Republicans split evenly. However, regarding the first count, failure to cooperate with the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, the subcommittee never subpoenaed McCarthy, but only "invited" him to testify. One senator and two staff members resigned from the subcommittee because of its dishonesty towards McCarthy, and the subcommittee, in its final report, dated January 2 1953, said that the matters under consideration "have become moot by reason of the 1952 election." No senator had ever been punished for something that had happened in a previous Congress or for declining an "invitation" to testify.

The Fall of McCarthy

One of the most prominent attacks on McCarthy's methods was an episode of the TV documentary series See It Now, hosted by journalist Edward R. Murrow, which was broadcast on March 9, 1954.

The March 1954 show was preceded by one on a related topic, about the dismissal of Milo Radulovich, a former reserve Air Force lieutenant who was accused of being a communist in 1953. The program was aired on October 20, 1953 and advanced opposition of the American public against McCarthy.

The March 9, 1954 show consisted primarily of clips of McCarthy speaking. In these clips, McCarthy

  • accuses the Democratic party of being "in charge of twenty years of treason" (1933-1953)
  • makes a similar accusation against the Administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman (Later, the Venona Project suggested the existence of Soviet agents present in both administrations, including Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White)
  • accuses the American Civil Liberties Union of being a front for the Communist party
  • accuses Secretary Stevens of telling "two Army officers that they had to take part in the cover-up of those who promoted and coddled communists."
  • accuses Reed Harris, (for many years a civil servant in the State Department, directing the information service) of helping the communist cause by curtailing some broadcasts to Israel.
  • berates witnesses, including an Army general.

The Murrow report, together with the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of the same year, sparked a nationwide popular opinion backlash against McCarthy, in part because for the first time his statements were being publicly challenged by news figures. To counter the negative publicity, McCarthy appeared on See It Now on April 6, 1954 and made a number of charges against Murrow. This response did not go over well with viewers, and the result was a further decline in his popularity. President Eisenhower, now free of McCarthy's political intimidation, referred to "McCarthywasm" in conversation with a reporter.

McCarthy's final years

After his censure, McCarthy continued to work in his senatorial duties for another two and a half years. Some contend that he was a changed man during this time, but "to insist, as some have, that McCarthy was a shattered man after the censure is sheer nonsense," said L. Brent Bozell Jr., one of his aides at the time. "His intellect was as sharp as ever. When he addressed himself to a problem, he was perfectly capable of dealing with it."

A member of the minority party in the Senate again, McCarthy continued to rail against communism. He warned against attendance at summit conferences with "the Reds", saying that "you cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers … without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder." He declared that "coexistence with communists is neither possible nor honorable nor desirable. Our longterm objective must be the eradication of communism from the face of the earth."

Journalist Richard Rovere (1959) wrote:

There have been descriptions of him as having spent his last years in an unbroken alcoholic stupor. These descriptions are inaccurate. He had always been a heavy drinker, and there were times in those seasons of discontent when he drank more than ever. But he was not always drunk. He went on the wagon (for him this meant beer instead of whiskey) for days and weeks at a time. The difficulty toward the end was that he couldn't hold the stuff. He went to pieces on his second or third drink. And he did not snap back quickly.

It was reported that McCarthy suffered from cirrhosis and was frequently hospitalized for alcoholism. Numerous eyewitnesses, including Senate aide George Reedy and journalist Tom Wicker, have reported finding him alarmingly drunk in the Senate. However, conservative activist William A. Rusher, who knew McCarthy personally, claimed that his drinking was moderate in his last years.

He died of acute hepatitis in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957, at the age of 48, and was given a state funeral attended by 70 Senators. St. Matthew's Cathedral performed a Solemn Pontifical Requiem before over a hundred priests and 2,000 others. Thousands of people viewed the body in Washington, and McCarthy was the first senator in 17 years to have funeral services in the Senate chamber. He was buried in St. Mary's Parish Cemetery, Appleton, Wisconsin. More than 30,000 Wisconsinites filed through St. Mary's Church to pay their last respects to him. Three senators — George Malone, William E Jenner, and Herman Welker — had flown from Washington to Appleton on the plane carrying McCarthy's casket. He was survived by his wife Jean, and their adopted daughter, Tierney.

Actual Soviet activities in U.S. Government

When Cold War-era decodings of Soviet intelligence messages were declassified (see Venona Project), and Soviet archives were opened, detailed information was revealed about Soviet espionage in the United States. Venona specifically references at least 349 people in the U.S., including citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents. The NSA asserts that these individuals were either engaged in clandestine activities or were approached by Soviet intelligence agencies with unknown results.

However, there has never been any indication that McCarthy possessed Venona intelligence at the time of his accusations, and McCarthy in fact accused the above of being communists (a legal association in the USA), not Soviet spies (which would be illegal). Additionally, even Venona and the Soviet files failed to produce evidence to support the claims against the vast majority of the people that McCarthy targeted.

Evidence

McCarthy himself was consistently unable to provide any evidence for his allegations. On one particular occasion, he declared in a floor speech that he would happily turn over evidence of subversive activities by government employees, whereupon Senator Herbert Lehman approached him and held out his hand. McCarthy, having no evidence with him on that or any other occasion, ignored Lehman, as did the rest of the Senate, a testament to the fear Senators had of McCarthy's political attacks.

HUAC

McCarthy is often incorrectly described as part of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (technically, HCUA, but generally known as HUAC). HUAC is best known for the investigation of Alger Hiss, and for its investigation of the Hollywood film industry, which led to the blacklisting of hundreds of actors, writers and directors. HUAC was established in May 1938 as the "Dies Committee" before McCarthy was elected to the Federal office, and, being a House committee, had no connection with McCarthy, who served in the Senate.

McCarthy in popular culture

  • In 1953, the popular comic strip Pogo introduced the visiting character "Simple J. Malarkey," a pugnacious and conniving wildcat with an unmistakable physical resemblance to McCarthy.
  • In the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, the character of Senator John Iselin, a demagogic anti-communist, is strongly patterned after McCarthy, even to the varying numbers of "communist infiltrators" he purports to have evidence of (in the film the number "57" is decided on, after inspiration by a Heinz ketchup bottle).
  • Footage of McCarthy was recently used in the 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck. about Edward R. Murrow and the fall of McCarthy (see "The Fall of McCarthy" chapter in this article), starring David Strathairn as Murrow and George Clooney as Fred Friendly, co-producer of See It Now, Murrow's show. Test audiences felt that the actor who portrayed Joseph McCarthy was overacting; they were unaware that only archive footage of the actual Joseph McCarthy was used in the film.

Notes

References

Additional reading

Scholarly secondary sources

  • Bayley, Edwin R. Joe McCarthy and the Press (University of Wisconsin Press, 1981)
  • Crosby, Donald F. God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957 (1978)
  • Daynes, Gary. Making Villains, Making Heroes: Joseph R. McCarthy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Politics of American Memory (Garland Pub., 1997)
  • Freeland, Richard M. The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946–1948 (1972)
  • Fried, Richard M. Men against McCarthy (Columbia University Press, 1976)
  • Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1990)
  • Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (2nd ed 1997)
  • Herman, Arthur. Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Free Press, 1999) pro-McCarthy
  • Latham, Earl. Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy (1969)
  • O'Brien, Michael. McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin (1981)
  • Oshinsky, David. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (University of Missouri Press, 1976)
  • Oshinsky, David. Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (1985)
  • Rosteck, Thomas. See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: Television Documentary and the Politics of Representation (University of Alabama Press, 1994)
  • Reeves, Thomas C. The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (1982)
  • Rovere, Richard Halworth. Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt Brace, 1959)

Other secondary sources

  • Belfrage, Cedric. The American Inquisition, 1945–1960: A Profile of the "McCarthy Era" (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989)
  • Coulter, Ann. Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Crown Forum, 2003)
  • Mitrokhin, Vasili and Andrew, Christopher. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (2000)
  • Ranville, Michael. To Strike at a King: The Turning Point in the McCarthy Witch Hunts (Momentum Books, 1997)

Primary sources

  • Fried, Albert. McCarthyism, The Great American Red Scare: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 1997)
  • McCarthy, Joseph. Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy Delivered in the United States Senate, 1950–1951 (1953)
  • McCarthy, Joseph. America's Retreat from Victory (Western Islands Publishing, 1952)
  • McCarthy, Joseph. McCarthyism, the Fight for America (Devin-Adair Co., 1952)
  • Rabinowitz, Victor. Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer's Memoir (University of Illinois Press, 1996)
  • Watkins, Arthur Vivian. Enough Rope: The inside story of the censure of Senator Joe McCarthy by his colleagues, the controversial hearings that signaled the end of a turbulent career and a fearsome era in American public life (Prentice Hall, 1969)

External links

Defense of McCarthy:

Criticism of McCarthy:

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Joseph McCarthy".

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