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Joseph McCarthy Biography

U.S. Senator

A bare-knuckled anti-communist crusader of the early 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy remains one of the most controversial and reviled American politicians of the 20th century. A Marine Corps veteran of World War II, McCarthy was elected to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin in 1946. He leapt to national fame on 9 February 1950 with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he waved a piece of paper and claimed "I have in my hand" a list of known communist loyalists working in the State Department. For the next four years McCarthy was one of the most powerful men in Washington as he developed a personal and political approach that has become known as McCarthyism: Bullying attacks and accusations, sneeringly anti-communist and anti-intellectual, with a tendency to brand anyone who disagreed with him as disloyal, un-American or a secret communist sympathizer. In 1954, at the height of McCarthy's power, the Army accused McCarthy and his staff of trying to get preferential treatment for a McCarthy consultant named G. David Schine; McCarthy retorted that the Army was trying to keep him from digging out more communists. In the televised hearings that followed, McCarthy's name-calling and browbeating tactics came off as mean-spirited and crude. McCarthy's popularity took a nose dive and his fellow senators voted to officially censure him a few months later. He remained in the Senate until his death in 1957.

Extra credit: McCarthy was an intelligence officer stationed in the Pacific during World War II, where he occasionally flew missions in the tail-gunner seat; this is the origin of his campaign nickname, "Tail-Gunner Joe"... A recent upsurge of defenders who claim that Joe was right about the communists along has yet to eclipse the mainstream view that he was a dirty dog.

Other U.S. senators of McCarthy's era included Prescott Bush of Connecticut (father of George Bush the elder), Adlai Stevenson of Illinois and "Mr. Republican," Robert Taft of Ohio.