Joseph McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy became a force in national politics by turning unsupported allegations of Communist infiltration into a spectacle that the press and political opponents could not easily ignore. His figures shifted, his evidence failed to materialize, and his accusations nonetheless helped poison political debate, damage senators who supported Harry S. Truman, and make McCarthyism a source of personal distress for the President.

Emergence and Political Method

In January, McCarthy was a forty-one-year-old junior senator from Wisconsin with little standing in the Senate. He was friendless there, and a poll of Washington correspondents had recently rated him the chamber’s worst member. He appeared to have reached a dead end. At dinner in the Colony Restaurant, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University suggested that McCarthy make an issue of Communist infiltration in government. McCarthy had already made some conspicuous but largely unnoticed accusations of subversion; the suggestion gave him a subject that could lift him out of obscurity.

A month later, in a Lincoln’s Birthday address in West Virginia, he brandished a piece of paper and claimed it contained the names of 205 Communists in the United States Department of State. The speech attracted little attention. McCarthy then repeated the basic charge in Salt Lake City and Reno, changing the number to fifty-seven and describing the alleged Communists as card-carrying members. Those appearances brought headlines. Back in the Senate, he spoke for five hours and claimed to have penetrated Truman’s supposed secrecy to identify eighty-one names. The changing totals were not a qualification of the charge so much as a recurring feature of its presentation: each version offered a new count while preserving the larger suggestion that the government harbored a hidden threat.

The performance supplied what his initial political position had lacked. McCarthy could command attention by presenting himself as the discoverer of a concealed danger, and his allegations invited the public to treat their scale as evidence of their importance. The book’s account emphasizes the gap between that public impact and what McCarthy could substantiate. He named no people, produced no new evidence, and did not establish the claims he was making. But the allegations continued to circulate, and their repetition could seem persuasive even where their particulars remained unsupported.

Accusations and Public Reception

The response to McCarthy’s charges was sharply divided. The press described him as desperate and reckless, and treated his pursuit of Communists as a travesty of the serious work of loyalty investigations. The book portrays him as a hard-drinking political brawler and demagogue, comparing him with Huey Long while judging him to lack Long’s charm and brilliance. McCarthy was unmoved by such criticism, just as he seemed untroubled by inconsistencies in his own claims. Sensational allegations often received the most prominent headlines, giving the charges a reach their evidentiary basis did not warrant.

That imbalance had political consequences. As the allegations spread, more Americans seemed willing to believe that even if McCarthy was wrong about individual cases, he might still have identified a real danger. The distinction between a substantiated accusation and a general atmosphere of suspicion weakened: a claim could fail in its details and still deepen the conviction that something was being concealed. Harry S. Truman assessed McCarthy not as a useful investigator but as an asset to the Kremlin, a judgment that turned the accusation back on its maker and the political climate he was helping to create.

McCarthy’s tactics were also visible in his treatment of witnesses. At a committee hearing involving Harry Vaughan, Republicans had prepared for a hostile political examination of the general. McCarthy appeared to relish his role, glowering at Vaughan and pointedly addressing the uniformed general as Mr. Vaughan. The moment captures a method based on confrontation and insinuation: the hearing could become a public contest over the witness’s credibility even without a demonstrated case against him.

Electoral Reach and Political Damage

The off-year elections revealed how far McCarthy’s accusations had entered the political atmosphere. The results were a setback for the Democrats, and concerns about the Korean War were joined by suspicion that the United States Department of State had been unduly accommodating toward Communists. McCarthy blamed the Korean disaster on the Kremlin and on officials he accused of sabotaging rearmament, including Dean Acheson and the President. Senator Wherry likewise assigned responsibility for American deaths to Acheson. In Illinois, Republican Everett Dirksen attacked Senator Scott Lucas, the Democratic majority leader, by invoking the young men returning in coffins.

McCarthy himself was not standing for reelection, but he had vowed to defeat Lucas and Millard Tydings. Both senators, described in the account as strong administration supporters, lost. Tydings’s defeat was especially marked by distortions: McCarthy and his aides circulated fabricated photographs that appeared to show Tydings speaking with Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party. In California, Richard Nixon defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas with a campaign that included a sexualized insinuation about her political loyalties. These contests show the accusations operating beyond the Senate floor: insinuation and manipulated images could be carried into campaigns and used to cast opponents as suspect.

For Truman, the effect was personal as well as political. He told a friend that one of the saddest consequences was seeing McCarthyism take hold. In more than thirty years of marriage, Bess Truman had seldom seen him so downhearted. He blamed himself for not maintaining pressure against McCarthy. The passage presents that response as an acknowledgment that public accusations could do damage even when they had not been proved: they altered the political environment and weakened allies before the allegations had been resolved.

Attacks on Truman’s Administration

McCarthy’s accusations widened into attacks on senior officials and on the President’s ability to govern. During the crisis in Korea, as Chinese forces advanced and Pyongyang fell, the prospect of a wider war dominated discussion in Washington. McCarthy called for Dean Acheson and George C. Marshall to resign and spoke of impeaching Truman. The account contrasts his escalating denunciations with Truman’s steadiness amid conferences about Korea and other international problems. McCarthy’s attacks offered a language of blame at a moment when the military situation appeared desperate, but they did not amount to evidence that the officials he named had conspired against the country.

His attack on George C. Marshall in the Senate in mid-June was among his most extreme. For nearly three hours, McCarthy portrayed Marshall and Dean Acheson as participants in a vast Communist conspiracy, blamed Marshall for policy toward China and for the strategy in Korea, and cast Truman as a President controlled by a network supposedly directed from Moscow. By the speech’s final hour, almost the entire Senate chamber had emptied; only three senators remained. The press condemned the charges, but McCarthy continued touring the country, waving what he called documentation. The account notes that he exposed no Communist in government and still had no evidence, yet the persistence of the performance seemed to matter more politically than the failure to produce proof.

The dispute reached a private reckoning at Blair House, where Truman convened a confidential meeting to ask advisers and political figures what could be done about McCarthy. The participants included Attorney General McGrath, Democratic senators, Solicitor General Philip B. Perlman, party chairman William Boyle, Clark Clifford, and the writer John Hersey as a witness. Truman rejected the prospect of answering McCarthy by adopting his methods. As Hersey later recounted the substance of Truman’s remarks, the President argued that he should not descend into personal abuse, that close engagement with a malicious accuser could leave its own stain, and that the proper answer to a major lie was the whole truth. The exchange presents Truman’s refusal to meet McCarthy on McCarthy’s terms as a deliberate political and moral choice, not an absence of anger.

Influence, Legacy, and Death

McCarthy’s influence extended into the presidential campaign atmosphere. In Milwaukee, with McCarthy seated behind him onstage, Ike declared that tolerance of Communism had damaged American life and connected the loss of China and the political changes in Eastern Europe to alleged Communists in Washington. A tribute to George C. Marshall that had been expected in the speech was removed. Because aides had told reporters to expect it, its absence drew attention in its own right, and even staunch supporters of Ike were appalled. Truman, in turn, condemned the Republican nominee for appearing to endorse McCarthy and for accepting the benefit of riding on his train. The episode shows how McCarthy’s presence could shape not only accusations made in the Senate but also the choices and public associations of other politicians.

The damage Truman feared was not confined to the moment. McCarthy’s charges helped make suspicion a political force, directed blame toward officials whose actions he contested, and contributed to the defeat of senators who supported the administration. Truman’s own judgment of McCarthy remained severe. The account later identifies McCarthy as the man Truman hated most and records that he died in 1957, aged forty-eight, from acute alcoholism. His career ended, but its political consequences had already outgrown the question of whether any of his shifting lists could be substantiated.