When McCarthy lost his first campaign as the Democratic nominee for district attorney, he decided to seek a nonpartisan position.
He soon sought a circuit judgeship and challenged a twenty-year incumbent who dismissed McCarthy as a long shot, an unelectable rookie. McCarthy campaigned with a vengeance and over the course of the election deliberately inflated his opponent's age and salary. His tactics worked and, in , the twenty-nine year old McCarthy became the youngest judge in Wisconsin history. Five years later, even though his service on the bench excluded him for military service, McCarthy joined the Marines, hoping that his combat experience would enhance his political stature.
As an intelligence officer stationed in the Pacific, he spent the war debriefing pilots after they returned from bombing raids over Japan. Yet, when he returned to campaign at home, he transformed himself into "tail-gunner Joe," the battle-scarred veteran who survived hazardous missions over Japanese-held territory and, in the process, "fired more bullets than any marine in history" during his fourteen a figure he later changed to seventeen and then thirty-two engagements with the enemy.
To prove his courage, he asked to receive and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Capitalizing on his war record, McCarthy narrowly defeated the overconfident Senator Robert La Follette in the Republican senatorial primary and assailed his Democratic opponent, Howard McMurray, as a man so desperate for election that he would accept communist support. They were simply fired. At the same time, Congress began its own loyalty investigations. A month later, another ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers, gave testimony that led to the most spectacular unmasking of the anti-Communist crusade, that of the former high-level State Department official Alger Hiss.
Hiss was convicted of perjury in January, , and sent to prison. The same month, an atomic spy ring was busted when the physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to being a member. His confession would lead, in , to the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for espionage, and, in , to their execution.
There were spies to be caught. Rooting out spies and informants was therefore a perfectly sensible policy, and that part did not take long. It was allowed to sweep up people who had only a notional connection to national security, like high-school teachers and Hollywood screenwriters.
It licensed anti-Communist groups of all types—official government agencies , quasi-official educational and ecclesiastical authorities , and pseudo-official editorialists and ad-hoc organizations —to pursue their own investigations. And it constantly redefined what made a person a security risk or disloyal. Espionage was a crime. But it was not a crime to be a member of the C.
Communists had been on the ballot in every Presidential election from to Nor was it a crime to be a fellow-traveller or to belong to a front organization. By , most of the people caught up in the investigations had already ended their relations with the C. Many were committed anti-Communists.
But their past was used to brand them as disloyal. McCarthy had nothing to do with any of this. By the time he took charge of his subcommittee, in , the C. McCarthy was therefore reduced to making national-security mountains out of molehills like Edward Rothschild, a bookbinder in the Government Printing Office who might have pilfered some classified documents but who had no access to atomic secrets.
Rothschild seems to have been the only plausible security risk that McCarthy ever uncovered; he lost his job, but he was never prosecuted. The case of Irving Peress was another McCarthy extravaganza. Peress was a dentist, drafted by the Army in because the Army needed dentists. He had declined to answer a question about his political affiliations on his loyalty questionnaire, and he may have had some prior connection to the C.
But he had no access to secret information—he fixed teeth—and by the time McCarthy got to him, at the end of , he was due to be discharged. McCarthy made up for the smallness of the fry he was nabbing by claiming that these people had been hired and promoted by higher-ups who knew all about their Communist connections. This case of overkill is one of the things that brought McCarthy to his Waterloo, the Army-McCarthy hearings, held in the spring of and followed, Tye estimates, by eighty million Americans, half the population.
The hearings had nothing to do with Communism. As he always did when attacked, McCarthy punched right back, countercharging that the Army had been holding Private Schine hostage—putting him on K. It was obvious that Cohn had made threats in an effort to get Schine excused from the ordinary duties of life as an Army private.
There was no way McCarthy was going to win that argument. McCarthy knew that Schine was worthless, but he also knew that Cohn was deeply attached to him, and McCarthy valued Cohn as a man who was as free of scruples as he was. McCarthy put his career at risk for Schine and Cohn, and he lost. It may have been honor among scoundrels, but it was honor, of a sort.
Welch tried to stop him. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? Again, McCarthy refused to change the subject. Welch let him talk. If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good.
Even reporters applauded. It was June 9, , the thirtieth day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. However, the relationship between the two nations was a tense one. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Army-McCarthy Hearings.
Joseph Goebbels In , the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he named Joseph Goebbels , his trusted friend and colleague, to the key post of minister for public enlightenment and propaganda. Joseph Hooker Joseph Hooker was a career U. Joseph Plumb Martin In the summer of , Joseph Plumb Martin enlisted in the Connecticut state militia at the tender age of 15; he later joined the Continental Army of General George Washington and served nearly seven years on behalf of the Revolutionary cause.
See More. Looking at all the evidence, the clearest conclusion is that Eisenhower did not want to confront Joe McCarthy at all. And during , he tried to avoid the whole issue, hoping the Senate would silence the explosive senator. McCarthy was a Republican, after all, and many fellow senators supported him. Ike needed to keep his party unified to pass bills in other areas; battling McCarthy would only stir up a civil war inside the GOP.
There had, after all, been real spies who penetrated into the State Department, notably Alger Hiss. And Communist agents had stolen classified secrets from the wartime Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were condemned to die in the electric chair as punishment for their theft of atomic secrets, Eisenhower did not for a moment consider granting them clemency.
On June 19, , they were both put to death. Eisenhower in improvised in dealing with McCarthy, at first trying to ignore him, then trying to outdo him in the Red-hunting business. Then he tried to seduce him with promises of new legislation to destroy Communism in America. None of these tactics worked. But at the start of , the picture changed. Joe McCarthy turned his investigatory resources on the US Army and on members of the administration itself.
Eisenhower had no choice but to fight back. The Army compiled a damaging dossier of dirt on Cohn, showing that he used threats and intimidation to demand that Schine be given plum assignments and easy duty.
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