Joseph McCarthy: Telegram to President Harry S. Truman

About the Author

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was born on November 14, 1908, in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, and died on May 2, 1957, in Bethesda, Maryland. The product of a rural midwestern background, McCarthy was an ambitious young man who studied law and became a circuit judge in 1940. He served in the Marines during World War II and fabricated his heroism as “Tailgunner Joe.” He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, but his fame resulted from his adoption of the anti-Communist cause in early 1950. A bold and uncompromising partisan, he fiercely attacked the administrations of both President Harry S. Truman and President Dwight D. Eisenhower for harboring Communists and Communist sympathizers within the federal government. He easily won reelection in 1952 on an anti-Communist platform and became a national figure notorious for hectoring witnesses at the Senate hearings he chaired and implying that they were hiding their own Communist leanings or protecting other members of the Communist Party.

McCarthy's technique was to get witnesses condemned in the court of public opinion by showing—or implying—that they associated with suspected or known Communists and Communist sympathizers. So deep was McCarthy's impact on the country that his strategy for fighting Communism became known as McCarthyism, a shorthand way of describing anyone who leveled strident and, some would say, rash charges of un-Americanism (disloyalty) against an individual. McCarthyism has become a political tactic in which an opponent's reputation is smeared with guilt by association.

Outside the Senate chambers, McCarthy used speeches to attack not only Communists and Communist sympathizers (or fellow travelers) but also his own political opponents—Democrats and, later, anyone in the Republican administration of President Eisenhower who criticized McCarthy. Until 1954 many Republican politicians considered McCarthy an asset and invited him to speak in support of their campaigns. McCarthy often alluded to evidence about specific individuals without actually naming them. His speeches and writings were full of innuendo and foreboding. Indeed, nearly all of his public speaking after the election of 1952 presented a view of an America besieged—internationally by the Soviet Union and internally by a Communist Party and its sympathizers that had penetrated the highest levels of the federal government in Washington. McCarthy spoke as if his own country were in imminent danger. If the president and nation did not act quickly, the battle against Communism would be lost. His sense of urgency made it seem as if each day the United States was falling further behind the Soviet Union and other Communist powers that were determined to rule the world and to destroy American-style democracy.

Even McCarthy's staunchest supporters had to admit that his attacks on such outstanding American officials as George C. Marshall (founder of the Marshall Plan that helped to restore Western Europe to prosperity after World War II) were disgraceful and preposterous. McCarthy's downfall came about when he challenged the U.S. Army itself and was taken to task by its attorney Joseph Welch on nationwide television. Welch's reprimand was combined with increasingly adverse treatment of McCarthy in the media, most significantly by Edward R. Murrow on CBS television, which eventually led to his censure by the U.S. Senate. As a man of great excesses, McCarthy was never able to curb his alcoholism, and he died from alcohol-related causes.