Joseph Raymond McCarthy was thirty-eight when he
entered the United States Senate in 1946 as a Republican from Wisconsin. The
product of a Wisconsin dairy farm and the Jesuits at Marquette University in
Milwaukee, he had made a career as a lawyer and judge before joining up in 1942
and serving in the Pacific. He had a satisfactory war record, though nothing
like as glittering as he made it seem afterwards, when he pretended to have
been a tail-gunner. Parading as a war-hero, he narrowly defeated the veteran
Robert M. La Follette Jr. for the Republican nomination for senator and then
swamped the Democrat in the election.
McCarthy was a far lesser figure than La Follette and
he quickly earned himself a bad reputation in the Senate. His colleagues
distrusted his untruthfulness, unscrupulousness, dubious connections with business
interests, apparent Nazi sympathies (he had many German-American voters in
Wisconsin) and general lack of principle. He was allowed only an unimportant
committee appointment. By 1950 he began to worry about his prospects for
re-election and looked round for a band-wagon to climb on. He duly found one in
the tide of anti-Communist feeling engendered by the sharpening tensions of the
Cold War, already exploited by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Delivering a speech to the Ohio County Women’s Republican
Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy warmed to the theme of concealed
Communist traitors lurking in the recesses of the State Department and subtly
bending the policy of the United States to their evil ideology. The speech
echoed remarks made not long before by a Republican congressman named Richard
M. Nixon, but by luck or judgment McCarthy had hit on a brilliant rhetorical
device. He did not, he said, have the time to name all the Communists in the
State Department, but ‘I have here in my hand,’ he announced, waving a piece of
paper, ‘a list of 205 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.’
Reporters covering what they had expected to be a
yawn-making piece of routine party politicking woke up and set the wires
humming to Washington and New York. What exactly the paper in McCarthy’s hand
was has never been established. Maybe it was his laundry list, but certainly it
was not a list of 205 names of State Department employees. The figure of 205
came from a 1946 exercise in loyalty screening which had identified ‘damaging
information’ about 284 State Department bureaucrats out of 3,000. Of these 284,
79 had been discharged. Which left 205, but McCarthy would soon admit that he
did not know the names of the 205 or what the ‘damaging information’ about them
was. He had gleaned the figures from a letter written by Secretary of State
James Byrnes to a congressman in 1946, and it may have been a copy of this
letter that he held in his hand. The actual figure soon became confused anyway,
as McCarthy kept plucking different numbers out of the air.
The Senator’s face scowled from newsstands all over
the country on the covers of Time and Newsweek, the term ‘McCarthyism’ was
coined by the Washington Post cartoonist Herblock and the polls showed his
approval rating with the public climbing rapidly to fifty per cent. Growing
ever more reckless, he hurled untrue accusations and insinuations at
distinguished figures including Professor Owen Lattimore and the diplomat
Philip Jessup, General Marshall and Dean Acheson, and called President Truman a
drunken son-of-a-bitch who ought to be impeached.
Comfortably re-elected for Wisconsin in 1952, McCarthy
was given the chairmanship of the hitherto unobtrusive Senate Committee on
Government Operations by the Republican leadership. They intended to send him
off the main line into a quiet siding, where he could do no harm, but the
attempt misfired. He was now empowered to hire staff and conduct
investigations, and in 1953 he and his committee embarked on extensive
enquiries into Communist influence in the Federal government. They failed to
unmask a single Communist, but they blackened many reputations, undermined the
morale of the government service and made the United States an object of
contempt abroad. President Eisenhower refused to tackle McCarthy and the
senator’s downfall did not come until he went too far by accusing the Army of
sheltering Communist traitors and the entire hearings were shown on television.
They attracted a huge audience and millions of Americans saw McCarthy the crude
and arrogant bully in action. They did not like what they saw. The Democrats on
his committee, now in the public eye, turned against him. The senior counsel
for the Army, a shrewd Boston trial lawyer named Joseph Welch, ran rings round
McCarthy and showed him up for what he was. The investigation collapsed. The
Senate formally censured him for bringing that august body into disrepute and
the senator from Wisconsin, shunned by his colleagues and deserted by the
media, retreated into drink and self-pity. He was forty-six when he died from
complications of alcoholism in May 1957.
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