Joseph McCarthy

On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin told a Republican women's group in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he held in his hand a list of 205 Communists working in the State Department. He had no such list. The number shifted in subsequent speeches — 57, 81, "a lot" — and the specific names remained elusive. None of that mattered much in the early Cold War atmosphere of suspicion and fear. McCarthy had found a lever, and for the next four years he used it to make himself the most feared man in Washington.

McCarthy's method was the accusation itself. To be named by McCarthy was to be ruined — careers ended, families destroyed, reputations shattered — regardless of evidence. He held hearings, produced witnesses, and generated headlines that kept the country in a state of low-grade political terror. Academics, screenwriters, diplomats, and soldiers all came under scrutiny. The State Department, the Army, and the Voice of America were investigated. President Eisenhower, who privately despised McCarthy, refused publicly to confront him for fear of the political fallout.

McCarthy overreached in the spring of 1954 when he took on the U.S. Army, and the hearings were televised. Millions of Americans watched him badger witnesses and make reckless charges, and what had seemed menacing in newspaper print looked ugly and bullying on screen. Army counsel Joseph Welch's quiet rebuke — "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" — crystallized a shift in public mood. The Senate censured McCarthy in December 1954. He died in office in 1957, at 48, largely isolated and drinking heavily.

McCarthyism outlasted McCarthy himself. The machinery of loyalty investigations, blacklists, and guilt by association he helped build remained in use long after his censure. The word he attached to the era — McCarthyism — entered the language as shorthand for character assassination by accusation, and it remains in circulation because the phenomenon it describes keeps recurring. The Cold War produced real spies; McCarthy caught none of them.