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Joesph McCarthy was born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, on November 14, 1908, and educated at Marquette University. He practiced law in Wisconsin until 1939, when he was elected circuit-court judge. During World War II he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, attaining the rank of captain during service in the Pacific theater of operations. In 1946 he was elected on the Republican ticket to the U.S. Senate and was reelected in 1952.McCarthy first attracted national attention in February 1950, with the charge that the Department of State had been infiltrated by Communists. Although his accusation was never substantiated, during the next three years he repeatedly accused various high-ranking officials, intellectuals and the Hollywood establishment of subversive activities. McCarthy pursued alleged communists with a fervor. He was a master at controlling the media and received enormous publicity. Suspected communists would be hauled in front of McCarthy's committee like a common criminals, often with no evidence at all. McCarthy's chief prosecutor was a New York Lawyer named Roy Cohn. Cohn has obnoxious and abrasive. He hated everyone, especially communists and homosexuals. When Cohn and McCarthy had someone in front of their committee they were merciless. They demanded that the "witness" turn in other suspected communists. Since most of the accused were never involved in any communist activity this was difficult. McCarthy would scream "I have a list" and wave a piece of paper demanding information. The list was never made public. Thousands of Americans lost jobs and careers during McCarthy's witch hunts.In 1953, as chairman of the Senate subcommittee on investigations, McCarthy continued his probe of alleged Communist activities, and in April 1954 he accused the secretary of the army of concealing foreign espionage activities. In rebuttal the secretary stated that members of the subcommittee staff had threatened army officials in efforts to obtain preferential treatment for a former unpaid consultant of the subcommittee who had been drafted. The secretary of the army had tapes of telephone conversations that recorded Cohn and McCarthy harassing army officials and threatening them with investigations. The tapes also revealed that Cohn had demanded that his assistant G. David Schine, not be called to military service. When Schine was called anyway McCarthy then made his accusations against the army. When the Secretary of the army was called to testify McCarthy attacked a lawyer that had worked for the secretary's chief counsel (lawyer). The army lawyer Mr. Welch, declared "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness...Have you no sense of decency sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?" McCarthy was exposed for the fraud he was.During the ensuing Senate investigations, which were widely publicized in the press and given nationwide radio and television coverage, McCarthy was cleared of the charges against him but was censured (punished) by the Senate for the methods he had used in his investigations and for his abuse of certain senators and Senate committees. His influence both in the Senate and on the national political scene diminished steadily thereafter. McCarthy remained in the Senate until his death in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 2, 1957. Roy Cohn outlived his mentor and returned to practice law in New York City. He specialized in getting big divorce settlements for rich women. Cohn lost his fortune when the IRS discovered he hadn't paid his taxes. Cohn died of AIDS on August 2, 1986.http://www.socialstudieshelp.com/Lesson_99_Notes.htmAlthough McCarthy's witch hunt was mostly without merit, it did point out many Communist sympathizers in government and quite a few in Hollywood. The following is a fair treatment of the McCarthy investigations.The Real McCarthy RecordWritten by James J. Drummey Monday, 02 September 1996During a speech in Milwaukee in 1952, Senator McCarthy dated the public phase of his fight against Communists to May 22, 1949, the night that former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was found dead on the ground outside Bethesda Naval Hospital. "The Communists hounded Forrestal to his death," said McCarthy. "They killed him just as definitely as if they had thrown him from that sixteenth-story window in Bethesda Naval Hospital." He said that "while I am not a sentimental man, I was touched deeply and left numb by the news of Forrestal's murder. But I was affected much more deeply when I heard of the Communist celebration when they heard of Forrestal's murder. On that night, I dedicated part of this fight to Jim Forrestal."Thus, Joe McCarthy was receptive in the fall of 1949 when three men brought to his office a 100-page FBI report alleging extensive Communist penetration of the State Department. The trio had asked three other Senators to awaken the American people to this dangerous situation, but only McCarthy was willing to take on this volatile project.Q. What was the security situation in the State Department at the time of McCarthy's Wheeling speech in February 1950?A. Communist infiltration of the State Department began in the 1930s. On September 2, 1939, former Communist Whittaker Chambers provided Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle with the names and Communist connections of two dozen spies in the government, including Alger Hiss. Berle took the information to President Roosevelt, but FDR laughed it off. Hiss moved rapidly up the State Department ladder and served as an advisor to Roosevelt at the disastrous Yalta Conference in 1945 that paved the way for the Soviet conquest of Central and Eastern Europe. Hiss also functioned as the secretary general of the founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, helped to draft the UN Charter, and later filled dozens of positions at the UN with American Communists before he was publicly exposed as a Soviet spy by Whittaker Chambers in 1948.The security problem at the State Department had worsened considerably in 1945 when a merger brought into the State Department thousands of employees from such war agencies as the Office of Strategic Services, the Office of War Information, and the Foreign Economic Administration — all of which were riddled with members of the communist underground. J. Anthony Panuch, the State Department official charged with supervising the 1945 merger, told a Senate committee in 1953 that "the biggest single thing that contributed to the infiltration of the State Department was the merger of 1945. The effects of that are still being felt." In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall and Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson engineered the firing of Panuch and the removal of every key member of his security staff.In June 1947, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee addressed a secret memorandum to Secretary Marshall, calling to his attention a condition that "developed and still flourishes in the State Department under the administration of Dean Acheson. It is evident that there is a deliberate, calculated program being carried out not only to protect communist personnel in high places but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity. On file in the department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States which involves a large number of State Department employees, some in high official positions."The memorandum listed the names of nine of these State Department officials and said that they were "only a few of the hundreds now employed in varying capacities who are protected and allowed to remain despite the fact that their presence is an obvious hazard to national security. There is also the extensive employment in highly classified positions of admitted homosexuals, who are historically known to be security risks." On June 24, 1947, Assistant Secretary of State John Peurifoy notified the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that ten persons had been dismissed from the department, five of whom had been listed in the memorandum. But from June 1947 until McCarthy's speech in February 1950, the State Department did not fire one person as a loyalty or security risk. In other branches of the government, however, more than 300 persons were discharged for loyalty reasons alone during the period from 1947 to 1951.It was also during the mid-to-late Forties that communist sympathizers in the State Department played a key role in the subjugation of mainland China by the Reds. "It is my judgment, and I was in the State Department at the time," said former Ambassador William D. Pawley, "that this whole fiasco, the loss of China and the subsequent difficulties with which the United States has been faced, was the result of mistaken policy of Dean Acheson, Phil Jessup, [Owen] Lattimore, John Carter Vincent, John Service, John Davies, [O.E.] Clubb, and others." Asked if he thought the mistaken policy was the result of "sincere mistakes of judgment," Pawley replied: "No, I don't."Q. Wasn't it reported that McCarthy used the number 205 in his Wheeling speech, lowered it to 57 later, and then raised it again to 81?A. Yes, this was reported, and here is the explanation: In the Wheeling speech, McCarthy referred to a letter that Secretary of State James Byrnes sent to Congressman Adolph Sabath in 1946. In that letter, Byrnes said that State Department security investigators had declared 284 persons unfit to hold jobs in the department because of Communist connections and other reasons, but that only 79 had been discharged, leaving 205 still on the State Department's payroll. McCarthy told his Wheeling audience that while he did not have the names of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes letter, he did have the names of 57 who were either members of or loyal to the Communist Party. On February 20, 1950, McCarthy gave the Senate information about 81 individuals — the 57 referred to at Wheeling and 24 others of less importance and about whom the evidence was less conclusive.The enemies of McCarthy have juggled these numbers around to make the Senator appear to be erratic and to distract attention from the paramount question: Were there still Alger Hisses in the State Department betraying this nation? McCarthy was not being inconsistent in his use of the numbers; the 57 and 81 were part of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes report. The question of methods seems to come up only when subversives or spies are on the witness stand. And those who most loudly deplored McCarthy's methods often resorted to the foulest methods themselves, including the use of lies, half-truths, and innuendos designed to stir up hysteria against him. What some people seemingly do not understand is that Communists are evildoers and that those who give aid and comfort to Communists — whether they are called dupes, fellow travelers, liberals, or progressives — are also evildoers who should be exposed and removed from positions of influence.Traitors and spies in high places are not easy to identify. They do not wear sweatshirts with the hammer and sickle emblazoned on the front. Only painstaking investigation and exhaustive questioning can reveal them as enemies. So why all the condemnation for those who expose spies and none for the spies themselves? Why didn't McCarthy's critics expose a traitor now and then and show everyone how much better they could do it? No, it was much easier to hound out of public life such determined enemies of the Reds as Martin Dies, Parnell Thomas, and Joe McCarthy than to muster the courage to face up to the howling communist wolfpack themselves.Q. So, McCarthy's treatment of persons appearing before his committee was not as bad as has been reported?A. Exactly. Let's look at the record. During 1953 and the first three months of 1954 (McCarthy was immobilized for the remainder of 1954 by two investigations of him), McCarthy's committee held 199 days of hearings and examined 653 witnesses. These individuals first appeared in executive session and were told of the evidence against them. If they were able to offer satisfactory explanations — and most of them were — they were dismissed and nobody ever knew they had been summoned.Those who appeared in public sessions were either hardened Fifth Amendment pleaders or persons about whom there was a reasonably strong presumption of guilt. But even those witnesses who were brazen, insulting, and defiant were afforded their constitutional rights to confer with their counsel before answering a question (something they would not be allowed to do in a courtroom), to confront their accusers or at least have them identified and have questions submitted to them by their counsel, and to invoke the First and Fifth Amendments rather than answer questions about their alleged communist associations.Of the 653 persons called by the McCarthy Committee during that 15-month period, 83 refused to answer questions about communist or espionage activities on constitutional grounds and their names were made public. Nine additional witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment in executive session, but their names were not made public. Some of the 83 were working or had worked for the Army, the Navy, the Government Printing Office, the Treasury Department, the Office of War Information, the Office of Strategic Services, the Veterans Administration, and the United Nations. Others were or had been employed at the Federal Telecommunications Laboratories in New Jersey, the secret radar laboratories of the Army Signal Corps in New Jersey, and General Electric defense plants in Massachusetts and New York. Nineteen of the 83, including such well-known communist propagandists as James S. Allen, Herbert Aptheker, and Earl Browder, were summoned because their writings were being carried in U.S. Information Service libraries around the world.Charles E. Ford, an attorney for Edward Rothschild in the Government Printing Office hearings, was so impressed with McCarthy's fairness toward his client that he declared: "I think the committee session at this day and in this place is most admirable and most American." Peter Gragis, who appeared before the McCarthy Committee on March 10, 1954, said that he had come to the hearing terrified because the press "had pointed out that you were very abusive, that you were crucifying people.... My experience has been quite the contrary. I have, I think, been very understandingly treated. I have been, I think, highly respected despite the fact that for some 20 years I had been more or less an active Communist."Q. What about all those individuals who lost their jobs in defense plants?A. During its probe of 13 defense plants whose contracts with the government ran into hundreds of millions of dollars a year, the McCarthy Committee heard 101 witnesses, two of whom — William H. Teto and Herman E. Thomas — provided the committee with information about the Red spy network and the efforts of the Communists to set up cells in the plants. The committee's exposures led to the dismissal of 32 persons and the tightening of security regulations at the plants. The president of General Electric, for example, issued a policy statement expressing concern about "the possible danger to the safety and security of company property and personnel whenever a General Electric employee admits he is a Communist or when he asserts before a competent investigating government body that he might incriminate himself by giving truthful answers concerning his Communist affiliations or his possible espionage or sabotage activities."At the time McCarthy's investigations were halted early in 1954, his probers had accumulated evidence involving an additional 155 defense workers, but he was never able to question those individuals under oath. On January 12, 1959, Congressman Gordon Scherer, a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, said that he knew of a minimum of 2,000 "potential espionage agents and saboteurs" working in the nation's defense plants. But there have been no congressional investigations in this vital area since Senator McCarthy was stymied in 1954.