Joseph McCarthy: Telegram to President Harry S. Truman

Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist speeches and writings occurred in an American postwar world shocked that the Soviet Union was able to explode its own atomic bomb so soon after the United States developed an advanced technology deemed far greater than anything its rivals could produce. The prosecution of spies such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg confirmed public suspicion that the Soviet Union had stolen the knowledge necessary to create its nuclear weapons. McCarthy began to speak out about government officeholders who had colluded with Communist agents to steal U.S. government secrets and skew American foreign policy when the United States became involved in the Korean War.

Although other politicians had leveled similar charges, none of them claimed to have the kind of specific information about Communist subversion that McCarthy said he had obtained. Far more ruthless and outspoken than any of his contemporaries, McCarthy attacked the highest officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and insinuated that they had tolerated a climate of disloyalty. On the heels of his “Enemies from Within” Speech, McCarthy wrote a Telegram to President Harry S. Truman reiterating his charges that a “nest of Communists and Communist sympathizers” was shaping American foreign policy and questioning Truman’s will to conduct further investigations into the presence of Communist sympathizers in government. McCarthy went far beyond other Republicans in criticizing his own party and president. He spoke as a force unto himself, disregarding the niceties of party loyalty and Senate decorum. He used his public speeches to endow himself with an aura of authority and menace that he used to intimidate the executive branch as well as his Senate colleagues and witnesses at his hearings.