History UsefulNotes / JosephMcCarthy

History, of course, remembers [=McCarthy=] as a wild, paranoid demagogue. A few years after the end of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar, an attempt was made to reconstruct him, when the Venona papers, released in 1995, revealed that there were more Soviet agents in the U.S. government than previously believed (though not nearly as many as [=McCarthy=] or HUAC argued). The general view is that, if anything, [=McCarthy’s=] antics damaged legitimate efforts to locate Soviet agents by making the cause look irrational. (Even in his own time, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower thought so, making similar snarky comments about how the Kremlin might as well put [=McCarthy=] on its payroll.) The release of the Mitrokhin documents showed that the KGB shared a similar opinion. [=McCarthy=] had a history of mendacity, having doctored his military record to appear more heroic than he was and using that as a cudgel to attack his opponents,[[note]]His nickname "Tailgunner Joe" comes from the fact that he had flown on bombing missions as an "observer" but exaggerated that to claim he served as a tailgunner, which he used when he first ran for the Senate in 1946. During that campaign, he accused his opponents, first Bob La Follette Jr. and then Howard [=McMurray=], of war profiteering with no evidence.[[/note]] and when in office, he exploited preexisting anti-communist fervor more than he tried to deal with actual communists or their activities competently.

While [=McCarthy=] is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar crusade [[{{UsefulNotes/Homophobia}} against homosexuals]], arguing by the InsaneTrollLogic that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to {{blackmail}}, the USSR could easily use them to spy on the United States and so known and suspected gay male and lesbian government workers had to be ferreted out to gauge their loyalty better. Some historians argue that this "Lavender scare," as it is called, did much more damage than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Naturally, the fact that [=McCarthy=]'s own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this). [=McCarthy=] himself was also frequently suspected by quite a few of his peers of being a "confirmed bachelor", especially given how often he was in Cohn's company, to the point it was a open secret on Capitol Hill that several of his colleagues would often tell homophobic jokes about him and Cohn behind their backs.

Public opinion began to turn against [=McCarthy=] after this, as even some of the most anti-communist Republicans now saw him as a liability and wanted him to StopBeingStereotypical. That December 2, the Senate voted to censure [=McCarthy=] by a 67–22 margin, with six abstentions. The censure received unanimous support from the Democrats present, while the Republicans were split evenly.[[note]]Fun fact: the only senator not present for the vote was none other than UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy, who was recuperating from back surgery at the time. The Kennedy family was generally friendly to [=McCarthy=], partly because they were also Irish Catholics, most of whom opposed Communism more strongly than the median American; he was godfather to UsefulNotes/RobertFKennedy's oldest daughter, Kathleen, and he even dated Patricia and Eunice Kennedy. Out of family loyalty, JFK tended to avoid speaking about him and refused to denounce him publicly (and once said "Half my voters in Massachusetts think [=McCarthy=] is a hero").[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] dismissed the censure as inconsequential and [[NeverMyFault declared that it was the result of (you guessed it) communist subversion.]] He continued to rail against the red menace, but [[CondemnedByHistory he had permanently lost his nationwide fame and political clout]].[[note]]Eisenhower quipped that [=McCarthyism=] was now [="McCarthywasm"=].[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] had already been noted to be somewhat of a heavy drinker in private, but the stress from the situation removed any inhibitions toward his alcoholism he might have had before. In 1957, he died at the age of forty-eight, officially from hepatitis, which his alcoholism caused, exacerbated, or both. As [=McCarthy=] was still a sitting senator at the time of his death, a special election was held to fill the vacancy in the Senate. Ironically, his seat was taken by William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat and future opponent of UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar.

* ''ComicStrip/{{Pogo}}'' satirized [=McCarthy=] as Simple J. Malarkey, a trigger-happy bobcat who joins the Jack Acid Society, the strip’s version of HUAC (doubtless the fervently anti-communist John Birch Society inspired the name).

* Comparisons between 1950s [=McCarthyism=] and the sociopolitical climate of America under UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan is a key tenet of the 1987 Music/{{REM}} song [[Music/{{Document}} "Exhuming McCarthy"]], which includes a sample of Joseph Welch's famous "no sense of decency" tirade.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with the investigations into Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs,[[note]]Though his close collaborator and chief counsel, lawyer Roy Cohn, is seen as the one of the main people responsible for having Ethel Rosenberg charged alongside her husband, despite the case against her being flimsy at best, and for pushing for Ethel and Julius to get the joint death penalty.[[/note]] the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the ''House of Representatives'', [=McCarthy=] was never a member of the House, only ever a ''senator'', that is, a member of the ''Senate'', a discrete chamber of the Congress. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, at least in their own time. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

Joseph Raymond "Tailgunner Joe"[[note]]He acquired that nickname while serving in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American judge and politician from Wisconsin. He is known by history for serving as a United States senator (as a Republican from 1947 until 1957) and inspiring the term [="McCarthyism"=]. Said word [[PersonAsVerb became (and still is) a byword]] for political demagoguery that uses the rhetoric of WitchHunt, RedScare, and PatrioticFervor to undermine the user's opponents by questioning [[MyCountryRightOrWrong their unconditional loyalty to their country]] and their personal convictions without offering proof and really not caring whether proof even exists. During his lifetime, he tried unsuccessfully to [[AppropriatedAppellation reclaim the label.]] [=McCarthy=] was an extremely anticommunist U.S. senator during TheFifties and the term derives from his methods. Due to his status as the icon of the greatest RedScare in American history, [=McCarthy=] is often MisBlamed for all the excesses of the period.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs[[note]]though his close collaborator and chief counsel, lawyer Roy Cohn, is seen as the one of the main people responsible for having Ethel Rosenberg charged alongside her husband, despite the case against her being flimsy at best, and for pushing for the couple getting the death penalty[[/note]], the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the ''House of Representatives'', [=McCarthy=] was never a member of the House, only ever a ''senator'', that is, a member of the ''Senate'', a discrete chamber of the Congress. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, at least in their own time. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin.[[note]]Believe it or not, in the 1946 Republican Senate primary election that got him nominated to compete for the Senate seat, he was supported by a Communist-controlled union, as they were hell-bent on a vendetta against Robert M. La Follette, Jr., an incumbent who was a known anti-Communist.[[/note]] Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished senator, having incurred criticism for supporting corporate subsidies[[note]]Due to his especially close relationship with the Pepsi company, he was called "The Pepsi-Cola Kid" before the "Tailgunner" moniker caught on.[[/note]] and, rather more bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and [=McCarthy=] became a target for snark for harping on the topic for so long after it was disproved.[[/note]] Making a speech to a Republican Party women's club in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. [=McCarthy=] came to be treated as a major campaigning asset for his party beginning with the 1950 Senate elections, when he helped stump for several successful Republican challengers to leading Democratic senators (though how much credit he personally merited for it is uncertain; even in his own party he was regarded as a SmallNameBigEgo type). Still, by 1952, the Democratic Party had been in control of the federal government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman, and they had implemented several reforms inspired by social democracy in that time. [=McCarthy=] accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, of course, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won.[[note]][=McCarthy=] himself handily won his bid for re-election to the Senate the same year, though by only 8¾ percentage points. He ran behind every other GOP candidate in Wisconsin in 1952: for example, Eisenhower carried the state by 22 points in the presidential race.[[/note]] In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for [=McCarthy=]. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

Ultimately, an emerging new medium called television brought [=McCarthy=] down. In early 1954, Edward R. Murrow’s series ''See It Now'' broadcast an episode condemning [=McCarthy=], a risky move at the time. [=McCarthy=] appeared on a later episode to respond, predictably not addressing a single point made against him and instead [[AdHominem accusing Murrow of being a communist]]. That same year, the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings investigated the U.S. Army for potential communist subversion. The television coverage of the hearings, especially the one of the young lawyer Fred Fisher, gave the American public a good, long look at [=McCarthy=], and they didn't like what they saw.[[note]]Some historians and journalists claim that it was down to [=McCarthy=] having finally [[BullyingADragon picked the wrong victim to bully]]. In the climate of 1950s America, it had been easy for [=McCarthy=] and his staff to scaremonger about perceived outsiders with relatively little social power, such as communists and homosexuals, but Fred Fisher was a friendly-looking young white man who worked for the Army, one of the US' most popular institutions, so trying to paint him as a scary "other" was sure to backfire spectacularly.[[/note]] The Wisconsin senator came off as a huge bully, and the hearings have become known for a RealLife ShutUpHannibal moment when Joseph Welch said, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch's words were met with applause from the rest of the room.

Public opinion began to turn against [=McCarthy=] after this, as even some of the most anti-communist Republicans now saw him as a liability and wanted him to StopBeingStereotypical. That December 2, the Senate voted to censure [=McCarthy=] by a 67–22 margin, with six abstentions. The censure received unanimous support from the Democrats present, while the Republicans were split evenly.[[note]]Fun fact: the only senator not present for the vote was none other than UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy, who was recuperating from back surgery at the time. The Kennedy family was generally friendly to [=McCarthy=], partly because they were also Irish Catholics, most of whom opposed Communism more strongly than the median American; he was godfather to UsefulNotes/RobertFKennedy's oldest daughter, Kathleen, and he even dated Patricia and Eunice Kennedy. Out of family loyalty, JFK tended to avoid speaking about him and refused to denounce him publicly.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] dismissed the censure as inconsequential and [[NeverMyFault declared that it was the result of (you guessed it) communist subversion.]] He continued to rail against the red menace, but [[CondemnedByHistory he had permanently lost his nationwide fame and political clout]].[[note]]Eisenhower quipped that [=McCarthyism=] was now [="McCarthywasm"=].[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] had already been noted to be somewhat of a heavy drinker in private, but the stress from the situation removed any inhibitions toward his alcoholism he might have had before. In 1957, he died at the age of forty-eight, officially from hepatitis, which his alcoholism caused, exacerbated, or both. As [=McCarthy=] was still a sitting senator at the time of his death, a special election was held to fill the vacancy in the Senate. Ironically, his seat was taken by William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat and future opponent of UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs[[note]]though his close friend and collaborator, lawyer Roy Cohn is seen as the one main people responsible for having Ethel Rosberg charged alongside her husband, despite the case against her being filmsy at best[[/note]], the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the ''House of Representatives'', [=McCarthy=] was never a member of the House, only ever a ''senator'', that is, a member of the ''Senate'', a discrete chamber of the Congress. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, at least in their own time. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs[[note]]though his close friend and collaborator, lawyer Roy Cohn is seen as the one main people responsible for having Ethel Rosberg charged alongside her husband, despite the case against her being filmsy at best[[note]], the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the ''House of Representatives'', [=McCarthy=] was never a member of the House, only ever a ''senator'', that is, a member of the ''Senate'', a discrete chamber of the Congress. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, at least in their own time. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs [[note]]though his close friend and collaborator, lawyer Roy Cohn is seen as the one main people responsible for having Ethel Rosberg charged alongside her husband, despite the case against her being filmsy at best[[note]], the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the ''House of Representatives'', [=McCarthy=] was never a member of the House, only ever a ''senator'', that is, a member of the ''Senate'', a discrete chamber of the Congress. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, at least in their own time. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs (though his close collaborator, lawyer Roy Cohn did), the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the ''House of Representatives'', [=McCarthy=] was never a member of the House, only ever a ''senator'', that is, a member of the ''Senate'', a discrete chamber of the Congress. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, at least in their own time. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the ''House of Representatives'', [=McCarthy=] was never a member of the House, only ever a ''senator'', that is, a member of the ''Senate'', a discrete chamber of the Congress. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, at least in their own time. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that [=McCarthy=] was a ''senator'', that is, a member of the ''Senate'', whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the other house of Congress, the ''House of Representatives''. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were at the time far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, at least in their own time. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin.[[note]]Believe it or not, in the 1946 Republican primary election that got him nominated to compete for the Senate seat, he was supported by a Communist-controlled union, as they were hell-bent on a vendetta against Robert M. La Foilette, Jr., an incumbent who was a known anti-Communist.[[/note]] Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished senator, having incurred criticism for supporting corporate subsidies[[note]]Due to his especially close relationship with the Pepsi company, he was called "The Pepsi-Cola Kid" before the "Tailgunner" moniker caught on.[[/note]] and, rather more bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and [=McCarthy=] became a target for snark for harping on the topic for so long after it was disproved.[[/note]] Making a speech to a Republican Party women's club in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. [=McCarthy=] came to be treated as a major campaigning asset for his party beginning with the 1950 Senate elections, when he helped stump for several successful Republican challengers to leading Democratic senators (though how much credit he personally merited for it is uncertain). Still, by 1952, the Democratic Party had been in control of the federal government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman, and they had implemented several reforms inspired by social democracy in that time. [=McCarthy=] accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, of course, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won.[[note]][=McCarthy=] himself won his bid for re-election to the Senate the same year, though by only 8¾ percentage points. He ran behind every other GOP candidate in Wisconsin in 1952: for example, Eisenhower carried the state by 22 points in the presidential race.[[/note]] In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for [=McCarthy=]. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

While [=McCarthy=] is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar crusade [[{{UsefulNotes/Homophobia}} against homosexuals]], arguing by the InsaneTrollLogic that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to {{blackmail}}, the USSR could easily use them to spy on the United States and so known and suspected gay male and lesbian government workers had to be ferreted out to gauge their loyalty better. Some historians argue that this "Lavender scare," as it is called, did much more damage than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Naturally, the fact that [=McCarthy=]'s own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this). [=McCarthy=] himself was also frequently suspected by quite a few of his peers of being a "confirmed bachelor" too, especially given how often he was in Cohn's company, to the point it was a open secret on Capitol Hill that several of his colleagues would often tell homophobic jokes about him and Cohn behind their backs.

Ultimately, an emerging new medium called television brought [=McCarthy=] down. In early 1954, Edward R. Murrow’s series ''See It Now'' broadcast an episode condemning [=McCarthy=], a risky move at the time. [=McCarthy=] appeared on a later episode to respond, predictably not addressing a single point made against him and instead [[AdHominem accusing Murrow of being a communist]]. That same year, the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings investigated the U.S. Army for potential communist subversion. The television coverage of the hearings, especially the one of the young lawyer Fred Fisher, gave the American public a good, long look at [=McCarthy=], and they didn't like what they saw.[[note]]Some historians and journalists claim that it was down to [=McCarthy=] having finally picked the wrong victim to bully. In the climate of 1950s America, it had been easy for [=McCarthy=] and his staff to scaremonger about perceived outsiders with relatively little social power, such as communists and homosexuals, but Fred Fisher was a friendly-looking young white man who worked for the Army, one of the US' most popular institutions, so trying to paint him as a scary "other" was sure to backfire spectacularly.[[/note]] The Wisconsin senator came off as a huge bully, and the hearings have become known for a RealLife ShutUpHannibal moment when Joseph Welch said, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch's words were met with applause from the rest of the room.

History, of course, remembers [=McCarthy=] as a wild, paranoid demagogue. A few years after the end of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar, an attempt was made to reconstruct him, when the Venona papers, released in 1995, revealed that there were more Soviet agents in the U.S. government than previously believed (though not nearly as many as [=McCarthy=] or HUAC argued). The general view is that, if anything, [=McCarthy’s=] antics damaged legitimate efforts to locate Soviet agents by making the cause look irrational. (Even in his own time, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower thought so, making similar snarky comments about how the Kremlin might as well put [=McCarthy=] on its payroll.) The release of the Mitrokhin documents showed that the KGB shared a similar opinion. [=McCarthy=] had a history of mendacity, having doctored his military record to appear more heroic than he was and using that as a cudgel to attack his opponents,[[note]]His nickname "Tailgunner Joe" comes from the fact that he had flown on bombing missions as an "observer" but exaggerated that to claim he served as a tailgunner, which he used when he first ran for the Senate in 1946. During that campaign, he accused his opponents, first Bob La Follette Jr. and then Howard [=McMurray=], of war profiteering with no evidence.[[/note]] and when in office, he exploited preexisting anti-communist fervor more than he tried to deal with actual communists competently.

Public opinion began to turn against [=McCarthy=] after this, as even some of the most anti-communist Republicans now saw him as a liability and wanted him to StopBeingStereotypical. That December 2, the Senate voted to censure [=McCarthy=] by a 67–22 margin, with six abstentions. The censure received unanimous support from the Democrats present, while the Republicans were split evenly.[[note]]Fun fact: the only senator not present for the vote was none other than UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy, who was recuperating from back surgery at the time. The Kennedy family was generally friendly to [=McCarthy=], partly because they were also Irish Catholics, most of whom opposed Communism more strongly than the median American; he was godfather to UsefulNotes/RobertFKennedy's oldest daughter, Kathleen, and he even dated Patricia and Eunice Kennedy. Out of family loyalty, JFK tended to avoid speaking about him and refused to denounce him publicly.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] dismissed the censure as inconsequential and [[NeverMyFault declared that it was the result of (you guessed it) communist subversion.]] He continued to rail against the red menace, but [[DeaderThanDisco he had lost his nationwide fame and political clout]].[[note]]Eisenhower quipped that [=McCarthyism=] was now [="McCarthywasm"=].[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] had already been noted to be somewhat of a heavy drinker in private, but the stress from the situation removed any inhibitions toward his alcoholism he might have had before. In 1957, he died at the age of forty-eight, officially from hepatitis, which his alcoholism caused, exacerbated, or both. As [=McCarthy=] was still a sitting senator at the time of his death, a special election was held to fill the vacancy in the Senate. Ironically, his seat was taken by William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat and future opponent of UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar.

Joseph Raymond "Tailgunner Joe"[[note]]He acquired that nickname while serving in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American judge and politician from Wisconsin. He is known by history for serving as a United States senator and inspiring the term [="McCarthyism"=]. Said word [[PersonAsVerb became (and still is) a byword]] for political demagoguery that uses the rhetoric of WitchHunt, RedScare, and PatrioticFervor to undermine the user's opponents by questioning [[MyCountryRightOrWrong their unconditional loyalty to their country]] and their personal convictions without offering proof and really not caring whether proof even exists. During his lifetime, he tried unsuccessfully to [[AppropriatedAppellation reclaim the label.]] [=McCarthy=] was an extremely anticommunist U.S. senator during TheFifties and the term derives from his methods. Due to his status as the icon of the greatest RedScare in American history, [=McCarthy=] is often MisBlamed for all the excesses of the period.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that [=McCarthy=] was a ''senator'', which is to say, a member of the ''Senate'', whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the other house of Congress, the ''House of Representatives''. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were at the time far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin.[[note]]Believe it or not, in the 1946 election that got him elected to the Senate, he was actually supported by a Communist-controlled union, as they were hell-bent on a vendetta against his anti-Communist opponent, Robert M. La Foilette, Jr.[[/note]] Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished senator, having incurred criticism for supporting corporate subsidies[[note]]Due to his especially close relationship with the Pepsi company, he was called "The Pepsi-Cola Kid" before the "Tailgunner" moniker caught on.[[/note]] and, rather more bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and [=McCarthy=] became a target for snark for harping on the topic for so long after it was disproved.[[/note]] Making a speech to a club in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. [=McCarthy=], a Republican, came to be treated as a major campaigning asset for his party beginning with the 1950 Senate elections, when he helped stump for several successful Republican challengers to leading Democratic senators (though how much credit he personally merited for it is uncertain). Still, by 1952, the Democratic Party had been in control of the federal government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman. [=McCarthy=] accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, of course, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won.[[note]][=McCarthy=] himself won his bid for re-election to the Senate the same year, though by only 8¾ percentage points. He ran behind every other GOP candidate in Wisconsin in 1952: for example, Eisenhower carried the state by 22 points in the presidential race.[[/note]] In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for [=McCarthy=]. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

During Eisenhower's presidency, [=McCarthy=] served on the Senate Committee on Government Operations, during which he investigated ''The Voice of America'', the U.S. government's radio program, where he ruined many careers via televised interviews that included highly personal and aggressive interrogation. He, alongside Roy Cohn (who worked as his chief counsel), also monitored the libraries in American embassies overseas and began crusading against books and authors that were considered communist, which eventually led to {{book burning}}s by [=McCarthy=] supporters at home (not that [=McCarthy=] ordered any himself). [=McCarthy=] attacked government employees, librarians, and other state officials, codifying [[AntiIntellectualism the anti-intellectual climate]] of the time. It became clear that he was burning his bridges when [=McCarthy=]'s staff director, J. B. Matthews, wrote an article that began with this claim: "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen." Even [=McCarthy=] was reluctant to support a potential breach into the First Amendment and many of his fellow senators were taken aback by this attack on the American clergy.

Public opinion began to turn against [=McCarthy=] after this, as even some of the most anti-communist Republicans now saw him as a liability and wanted him to StopBeingStereotypical. That December 2, the Senate voted to censure [=McCarthy=] by a 67–22 margin, with six abstentions. The censure received unanimous support from the Democrats present, while the Republicans were split evenly.[[note]]Fun fact: the only senator not present for the vote was none other than UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy, who was recuperating from back surgery at the time. The Kennedy family was generally friendly to [=McCarthy=]; he was godfather to UsefulNotes/RobertFKennedy's oldest daughter, Kathleen, and he even dated Patricia and Eunice Kennedy. Out of family loyalty, JFK tended to avoid speaking about him and refused to denounce him publicly.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] dismissed the censure as inconsequential and [[NeverMyFault declared that it was the result of (you guessed it) communist subversion.]] He continued to rail against the red menace, but [[DeaderThanDisco he had lost his nationwide fame and political clout]].[[note]]Eisenhower quipped that [=McCarthyism=] was now [="McCarthywasm"=].[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] had already been noted to be somewhat of a heavy drinker in private, but the stress from the situation removed any inhibitions toward his alcoholism he might have had before. In 1957, he died at the age of forty-eight, officially from hepatitis, which his alcoholism caused, exacerbated, or both. As [=McCarthy=] was still a sitting senator at the time of his death, a special election was held to fill the vacancy in the Senate. Ironically, his seat was taken by William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat and future opponent of UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar.

History, of course, remembers [=McCarthy=] as a wild, paranoid demagogue. At the end of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar, an attempt was made to reconstruct him, with the 1995 release of the Venona papers, which revealed that there were more Soviet agents in the U.S. government than previously believed (though not nearly as many as [=McCarthy=] or HUAC argued). The general view is that, if anything, [=McCarthy’s=] antics damaged legitimate efforts to locate Soviet agents by making the cause look irrational. (Even in his own time, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower thought so, making similar snarky comments about how the Kremlin might as well put [=McCarthy=] on its payroll.) The release of the Mitrokhin documents showed that the KGB shared a similar opinion. [=McCarthy=] had a history of mendacity, having doctored his military record to appear more heroic than he was and using that as a cudgel to attack his opponents,[[note]]His nickname "Tailgunner Joe" comes from the fact that he had flown on bombing missions as an "observer" but exaggerated that to claim he served as a tailgunner, which he used when he first ran for the Senate in 1946. During that campaign, he accused his opponents, first Bob La Follette Jr. and then Howard [=McMurray=], of war profiteering with no evidence.[[/note]] and when in office, he exploited preexisting anti-communist fervor more than he tried to deal with actual communists competently.

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin.[[note]]Believe it or not, in the 1946 election that got him elected to the Senate, he was actually supported by a Communist-controlled union, as they were hell-bent on a vendetta against his anti-Communist opponent, Robert M. La Foilette, Jr.[[/note]] Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished senator, having incurred criticism for supporting corporate subsidies[[note]]Due to his especially close relationship with the Pepsi company, he was called "The Pepsi-Cola Kid" before the "Tailgunner" moniker caught on.[[/note]] and, rather more bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and [=McCarthy=] became a target for snark for harping on the topic for so long after it was disproved.[[/note]] Making a speech to a club in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. [=McCarthy=], a Republican, came to be treated as a major campaigning asset for his party beginning with the 1950 Senate elections, when he helped stump for several successful Republican challengers to leading Democratic senators (though how much credit he personally merited for it is uncertain). Still, by 1952, the Democratic Party had been in control of the federal government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman. [=McCarthy=] accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, of course, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won.[[note]][=McCarthy=] himself won his bid for re-election to the Senate the same year, though by only 8¾ percentage points. He ran behind every other GOP candidate in Wisconsin in 1952: for example, Eisenhower carried the state by 22 points in the presidential race.[[/note]] In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for McCarthy. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin.[[note]]Believe it or not, in the 1946 election that got him elected to the Senate, he was actually supported by a Communist-controlled union, as they were hell-bent on a vendetta against his anti-Communist opponent, Robert M. La Foilette, Jr.[[/note]] Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished senator, having incurred criticism for supporting corporate subsidies[[note]]Due to his especially close relationship with the Pepsi company, he was called "The Pepsi-Cola Kid" before the "Tailgunner" moniker caught on.[[/note]] and, rather more bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and [=McCarthy=] became a target for snark for harping on the topic for so long after it was disproved.[[/note]] Making a speech to a club in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. [=McCarthy=], a Republican, came to be treated as a major campaigning asset for his party beginning with the 1950 Senate elections, when he helped stump for several successful Republican challengers to leading Democratic senators (though how much credit he personally merited for it is uncertain). Still, by 1952, the Democratic Party had been in control of the federal government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman. [=McCarthy=] accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, of course, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won.[[note]][=McCarthy=] himself won his bid for re-election to the Senate the same year, though by only 8¾ percentage points. He ran behind every other GOP candidate in Wisconsin in 1952: for example, Eisenhower carried the state by 22 points in the presidential race.[[/note]] In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but [[NoTrueScotsman it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for McCarthy]]. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that [=McCarthy=] was a ''senator'', which is to say, a member of the ''Senate'', whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the other house of Congress, the ''House of Representatives''. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were at the time far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics. [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare, with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it permanently in American mainstream politics.

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin. Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished senator, having incurred criticism for supporting corporate subsidies[[note]]Due to his especially close relationship with the Pepsi company, he was called "The Pepsi-Cola Kid" before the "Tailgunner" moniker caught on.[[/note]] and, rather more bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and [=McCarthy=] became a target for snark for harping on the topic for so long after it was disproved.[[/note]] Making a speech to a club in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. [=McCarthy=], a Republican, came to be treated as a major campaigning asset for his party beginning with the 1950 Senate elections, when he helped stump for several successful Republican challengers to leading Democratic senators (though how much credit he personally merited for it is uncertain). Still, by 1952, the Democratic Party had been in control of the federal government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman. [=McCarthy=] accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, of course, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won.[[note]][=McCarthy=] himself won his bid for re-election to the Senate the same year, though by only 8¾ percentage points. He ran behind every other GOP candidate in Wisconsin in 1952: for example, Eisenhower carried the state by 22 points in the presidential race.[[/note]] In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but [[NoTrueScotsman it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for McCarthy]]. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

During Eisenhower's presidency, [=McCarthy=] served on the Senate Committee on Government Operations, during which he investigated ''The Voice of America'', the U.S. government's radio program, where he ruined many careers via televised interviews that included highly personal and aggressive interrogation. He, alongside Roy Cohn (who worked as his chief counsel), also monitored the libraries in American embassies overseas and began crusading against books and authors that were considered communist, which eventually led to {{book burning}}s by [=McCarthy=] supporters at home (not that [=McCarthy=] ordered any himself). [=McCarthy=] attacked government employees, librarians, and other state officials, codifying [[AntiIntellectualism the anti-intellectual climate]] of the time. It became clear that he was burning his bridges when [=McCarthy=]'s staff director, J. B. Matthews, wrote an article that began with this claim: "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen." Even [=McCarthy=] was reluctant to support a potential breach into the First Amendment and many of his fellow senators were taken aback by this attack on the American clergy. While [=McCarthy=] is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar crusade [[{{UsefulNotes/Homophobia}} against homosexuals]], arguing by the InsaneTrollLogic that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to {{blackmail}}, the USSR could easily use them to spy on the United States and so known and suspected gay male and lesbian government workers had to be ferreted out to gauge their loyalty better. Some historians argue that this "Lavender scare," as it is called, did much more damage than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Naturally, the fact that [=McCarthy=]'s own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this). [=McCarthy=] himself was also frequently suspected by quite a few of his peers of being a "confirmed bachelor" too, especially given how often he was in Cohn's company, to the point it was a open secret on Capitol Hill that several of his colleagues would often tell homophobic jokes about him and Cohn behind their backs.

Ultimately, an emerging new medium called television brought [=McCarthy=] down. In early 1954, Edward R. Murrow’s series ''See It Now'' broadcast an episode condemning [=McCarthy=], a risky move at the time. [=McCarthy=] appeared on a later episode to respond, predictably not addressing a single point made against him and instead [[AdHominem accusing Murrow of being a communist]]. That same year, the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings investigated the U.S. Army for potential communist subversion. The television coverage of the hearings, especially the one of the young lawyer Fred Fisher, gave the American public a good, long look at [=McCarthy=], and they didn't like what they saw.[[note]]Some historians and journalists claim that it was down to [=McCarthy=] having finally picked the wrong victim to bully. In the climate of 1950s America, it had been easy for [=McCarthy=] and his staff to scaremonger about perceived outsiders with relatively little social power, such as communists]] and homosexuals, but Fred Fisher was a friendly-looking young white man who worked for the Army, one of the US' most popular institutions, so trying to paint him as a scary "other" was sure to backfire spectacularly.[[/note]] The Wisconsin senator came off as bullying and the hearings have become known for a ShutUpHannibal moment, when Joseph Welch said, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch's words were met with applause from the rest of the room.

After ''See It Now'' and the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings, public opinion began to turn against [=McCarthy=]. Even some of the most anti-communist Republicans now saw him as a liability and wanted him to StopBeingStereotypical. That December 2, the Senate voted to censure [=McCarthy=] by a 67–22 margin, with six abstentions. The censure received unanimous support from the Democrats present, while the Republicans were split evenly.[[note]]Fun fact: the only senator not present for the vote was none other than UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy, who was recuperating from back surgery at the time. The Kennedy family was generally friendly to [=McCarthy=]; he was godfather to UsefulNotes/RobertFKennedy's oldest daughter, Kathleen, and he even dated Patricia and Eunice Kennedy. Out of family loyalty, JFK tended to avoid speaking about him and refused to denounce him publicly.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] dismissed the censure as inconsequential and [[NeverMyFault declared that it was the result of (you guessed it) communist subversion.]] He continued to rail against the red menace, but [[DeaderThanDisco he had lost his nationwide fame and political clout]].[[note]]Eisenhower quipped that [=McCarthyism=] was now [="McCarthywasm"=].[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] had already been noted to be somewhat of a heavy drinker in private, but the stress from the situation removed any inhibitions toward his alcoholism he might have had before. In 1957, he died at the age of forty-eight, officially from hepatitis, which his alcoholism caused, exacerbated, or both. As [=McCarthy=] was still a sitting senator at the time of his death, a special election was held to fill the vacancy in the Senate. Ironically, his seat was taken by William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat and future opponent of UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar.

Believe it or not, in the 1946 election that got him elected to the Senate, he was actually supported by a Communist-controlled union, as they were hell-bent on a vendetta against his anti-Communist opponent, Robert M. La Foilette, Jr.

Joseph Raymond "Tailgunner Joe"[[note]]He acquired that nickname while serving in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American judge and politician from Wisconsin. He is known by history for serving as a United States senator and inspiring the term [="McCarthyism"=]. Said word [[PersonAsVerb became (and remains so to this day) a byword]] for political demagoguery that uses the rhetoric of WitchHunt, RedScare, and PatrioticFervor to undermine the user's opponents by questioning [[MyCountryRightOrWrong their unconditional loyalty to their country]] and their personal convictions without offering proof. During his lifetime, he tried unsuccessfully to [[AppropriatedAppellation reclaim the label.]] [=McCarthy=] was an extremely anticommunist U.S. senator during TheFifties and the term derives from his methods. Due to his status as the icon of the greatest RedScare in American history, [=McCarthy=] is often MisBlamed for all the excesses of the period.

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin. Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished senator, having incurred criticism for supporting corporate subsidies and, rather more bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and [=McCarthy=] became a target for snark for harping on the topic for so long after it was disproved.[[/note]] Making a speech to a club in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. [=McCarthy=], a Republican, came to be treated as a major campaigning asset for his party beginning with the 1950 Senate elections, when he helped stump for several successful Republican challengers to leading Democratic senators (though how much credit he personally merited for it is uncertain). Still, by 1952, the Democratic Party had been in control of the federal government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman. [=McCarthy=] accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, naturally, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won. In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but [[NoTrueScotsman it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for McCarthy]]. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

During Eisenhower's presidency, [=McCarthy=] served on the Senate Committee on Government Operations, during which he investigated ''The Voice of America'', the U.S. government's radio program, where he ruined many careers via televised interviews that included highly personal and aggressive interrogation. He, alongside Roy Cohn (who worked as his chief counsel), also monitored the libraries in American embassies overseas and began crusading against books and authors that were considered communist, which eventually led to {{book burning}}s by [=McCarthy=] supporters at home (not that [=McCarthy=] ordered any himself). [=McCarthy=] attacked government employees, librarians, and other state officials, codifying [[AntiIntellectualism the anti-intellectual climate]] of the time. It became clear that he was burning his bridges when [=McCarthy=]'s staff director, J. B. Matthews, wrote an article that began with this claim: "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen." Even [=McCarthy=] was reluctant to support a potential breach into the First Amendment and many of his fellow senators were taken aback by this attack on the American clergy. While [=McCarthy=] is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar crusade [[{{UsefulNotes/Homophobia}} against homosexuals]], arguing by the InsaneTrollLogic that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to {{blackmail}}, the USSR could easily use them to spy on the United States and so known and suspected gay male and lesbian government workers had to be ferreted out to gauge their loyalty better. Some historians argue that this "Lavender scare," as it is called, actually did much more damage than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Naturally, the fact that [=McCarthy=]'s own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this). [=McCarthy=] himself was also frequently suspected by quite a few of his peers of being a "confirmed bachelor" too, especially due to the fact that he was very often in Cohn's company, to the point it was a open secret on Capitol Hill that several of his colleagues would often tell homophobic jokes about him and Cohn behind their backs.

Ultimately, an emerging new medium called television brought [=McCarthy=] down. In early 1954, Edward R. Murrow’s ''See It Now'' series broadcast an episode condemning [=McCarthy=], a risky move at the time. [=McCarthy=] appeared on a later episode to respond, predictably not addressing a single point made against him and instead [[AdHominem accusing Murrow of being a communist]]. That same year, the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings investigated the U.S. Army for potential communist subversion. The television coverage of the hearings, especially the one of the young lawyer Fred Fisher, gave the American public a good, long look at [=McCarthy=], and they didn't like what they saw.[[note]]Some historians and journalists claim that it was down to [=McCarthy=] having finally picked the wrong victim to bully. In the climate of 1950s America, it had been easy for [=McCarthy=] and his staff to scaremonger about perceived outsiders with relatively little social power, such as communists and homosexuals, but Fred Fisher was a friendly-looking young white man who worked for the Army, one of the US's most popular institutions, so trying to paint him as a scary "other" was sure to backfire spectacularly.[[/note]] The Wisconsin senator came off as bullying and the hearings have become known for a ShutUpHannibal moment, when Joseph Welch said, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch's words were met with applause from the rest of the room.

Believe it or not, in the 1946 election that got him elected to the Senate, he was actually supported by a Communist-controlled union, as they were hell-bent on a vendetta against his anti-Communist opponent, Robert M. La Foilette, Jr..

* Most works of fiction dealing with [=McCarthyism=] depict a NoCelebritiesWereHarmed version of [=McCarthy=] rather than actually naming him. A notable example of this is ''Literature/TheManchurianCandidate'', in which the [=McCarthy=] analogue turns out to be a Soviet agent sowing discord on purpose, perhaps building from Truman’s and Eisenhower’s comments.

* Played by Creator/PeterBoyle in the 1977 television movie ''Tail Gunner Joe''.

* Comparisons between 1950's [=McCarthyism=] and the sociopolitical climate of America under UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan is a key tenant of the 1987 Music/{{REM}} song [[Music/{{Document}} "Exhuming McCarthy"]], which includes a sample of Joseph Welch's famous "no sense of decency" tirade.

Ultimately, an emerging new medium called television brought [=McCarthy=] down. In early 1954, Edward R. Murrow’s ''See It Now'' series broadcast an episode condemning [=McCarthy=], a risky move at the time. [=McCarthy=] appeared on a later episode to respond, predictably not addressing a single point made against him and instead [[AdHominem accusing Murrow of being a communist]]. That same year, the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings investigated the U.S. Army for potential communist subversion. The television coverage of the hearings, especially the one of the young lawyer Fred Fisher, gave the American public a good, long look at [=McCarthy=], and they didn't like what they saw.[[note]]Some would claim that it was down to [=McCarthy=] having finally picked the wrong victim to bully. In the climate of 1950s America, it had been easy for [=McCarthy=] and his staff to scaremonger about perceived outsiders with relatively little social power, such as communists and homosexuals, but Fred Fisher was a friendly-looking young white man who worked for the Army, one of the US's most popular institutions, so trying to paint him as a scary "other" was sure to backfire spectacularly.[[/note]] The Wisconsin senator came off as bullying and the hearings have become known for a ShutUpHannibal moment, when Joseph Welch said, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch's words were met with applause from the rest of the room.

Ultimately, an emerging new medium called television brought [=McCarthy=] down. In early 1954, Edward R. Murrow’s ''See It Now'' series broadcast an episode condemning [=McCarthy=], a risky move at the time. [=McCarthy=] appeared on a later episode to respond, predictably not addressing a single point made against him and instead [[AdHominem accusing Murrow of being a communist.]] That same year, the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings investigated the U.S. Army for potential communist subversion. The television coverage of the hearings gave the American public a good, long look at [=McCarthy=], and they didn't like what they saw. The Wisconsin senator came off as bullying and the hearings have become known for a ShutUpHannibal moment, when Joseph Welch said, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch's words were met with applause from the rest of the room.

After ''See It Now'' and the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings, public opinion began to turn against [=McCarthy=]. Even some of the most anti-communist Republicans now saw him as a liability and wanted him to StopBeingStereotypical. That December 2, the Senate voted to censure [=McCarthy=] by a 67–22 margin, with six abstentions. The censure received unanimous support from the Democrats present, while the Republicans were split evenly.[[note]]Fun fact: the only senator not present for the vote was none other than UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy, who was recuperating from back surgery at the time. The Kennedy family was generally friendly to [=McCarthy=]; he was godfather to UsefulNotes/RobertFKennedy's oldest daughter, Kathleen, and he even dated Patricia and Eunice Kennedy. Out of family loyalty, JFK tended to avoid speaking about him and refused to denounce him publicly.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] dismissed the censure as inconsequential and [[NeverMyFault declared that it was the result of (you guessed it) communist subversion.]] He continued to rail against the red menace, but [[DeaderThanDisco he had lost his nationwide fame and political clout.]][[note]]Eisenhower quipped that [=McCarthyism=] was now [=“McCarthywasm”=].[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] began drinking heavily. In 1957, he died at the age of forty-eight, officially from hepatitis, which his alcoholism caused, exacerbated, or both. As [=McCarthy=] was still a sitting senator at the time of his death, a special election was held to fill the vacancy in the Senate. Ironically, his seat was taken by William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat and future opponent of UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar.

During Eisenhower's presidency, [=McCarthy=] served on the Senate Committee on Government Operations, during which he investigated ''The Voice of America'', the U.S. government's radio program, where he ruined many careers via televised interviews that included highly personal and aggressive interrogation. He, alongside Roy Cohn (who worked as his chief counsel), also monitored the libraries in American embassies overseas and began crusading against books and authors that were considered communist, which eventually led to {{book burning}}s by [=McCarthy=] supporters at home (not that [=McCarthy=] ordered any himself). [=McCarthy=] attacked government employees, librarians, and other state officials, codifying [[AntiIntellectualism the anti-intellectual climate]] of the time. It became clear that he was burning his bridges when [=McCarthy=]'s staff director, J. B. Matthews, wrote an article that began with this claim: "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen." Even [=McCarthy=] was reluctant to support a potential breach into the First Amendment and many of his fellow senators were taken aback by this attack on the American clergy. While [=McCarthy=] is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar crusade [[{{UsefulNotes/Homophobia}} against homosexuals]], arguing by the InsaneTrollLogic that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to {{blackmail}}, the USSR could easily use them to spy on the United States and so known and suspected gay male and lesbian government workers had to be ferreted out to gauge their loyalty better. Some historians argue that this "Lavender scare," as it is called, actually did much more damage than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Naturally, the fact that [=McCarthy=]'s own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this). [=McCarthy=] himself was also frequently suspected by quite a few of his peers of being a "confirmed bachelor" too, especially due to the fact that he was very often in Cohn's company, to the point it was a open secret on Capitol Hill that several of his colleagues would frequently tell homophobic jokes about him and Cohn behind their backs.

During Eisenhower's presidency, [=McCarthy=] served on the Senate Committee on Government Operations, during which he investigated ''The Voice of America'', the U.S. government's radio program, where he ruined many careers via televised interviews that included highly personal and aggressive interrogation. He, alongside Roy Cohn (who worked as his chief counsel), also monitored the libraries in American embassies overseas and began crusading against books and authors that were considered communist, which eventually led to {{book burning}}s by [=McCarthy=] supporters at home (not that [=McCarthy=] ordered any himself). [=McCarthy=] attacked government employees, librarians, and other state officials, codifying [[AntiIntellectualism the anti-intellectual climate]] of the time. It became clear that he was burning his bridges when [=McCarthy=]'s staff director, J. B. Matthews, wrote an article that began with this claim: "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen." Even [=McCarthy=] was reluctant to support a potential breach into the First Amendment and many of his fellow senators were taken aback by this attack on the American clergy. While [=McCarthy=] is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar crusade [[{{UsefulNotes/Homophobia}} against homosexuals]], arguing by the InsaneTrollLogic that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to {{blackmail}}, the USSR could easily use them to spy on the United States and so known and suspected gay male and lesbian government workers had to be ferreted out to gauge their loyalty better. Some historians argue that this "Lavender scare," as it is called, actually did much more damage than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Naturally, the fact that [=McCarthy=]'s own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this).

Ultimately, an emerging new medium called television brought [=McCarthy=] down. In early 1954, Edward R. Murrow’s ''See It Now'' series broadcast an episode condemning [=McCarthy=], a risky move at the time. [=McCarthy=] appeared on a later episode to respond, predictably not addressing a single point made against him and instead [[AdHominem accusing Murrow of being a communist.]] That same year, the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings investigated the U.S. Army for potential communist subversion. The television coverage of the hearings gave the American public a good, long look at [=McCarthy=], and they didn’t like what they saw. The Wisconsin senator came off as bullying and the hearings have become known for a ShutUpHannibal moment, when Joseph Welch said, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Welch’s words were met with applause from the rest of the room.

Joseph Raymond "Tailgunner Joe"[[note]]He acquired that nickname while serving in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American judge and politician from Wisconsin. He is known by history for serving as a United States senator and inspiring the term [="McCarthyism"=]. Said word became (and remains so to this day) a byword for political demagoguery that uses the rhetoric of WitchHunt, RedScare, and PatrioticFervor to undermine the user's opponents by questioning [[MyCountryRightOrWrong their unconditional loyalty to their country]] and their personal convictions without offering proof. During his lifetime, he tried unsuccessfully to [[AppropriatedAppellation reclaim the label.]] [=McCarthy=] was an extremely anticommunist U.S. senator during TheFifties and the term derives from his methods. Due to his status as the icon of the greatest RedScare in American history, [=McCarthy=] is often MisBlamed for all the excesses of the period.

* A rabid anti-communist Senator Gallo (a rooster) appears in ''{{ComicBook/Blacksad}}'', secretly leading a project to ensure the American government is safe in the event of an all-out Russian nuclear attack. When Blacksad gets mixed up in this, he blackmails Gallo into releasing him, but ends up painted as having sold out others to save his skin.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that [=McCarthy=] was a ''senator'', which is to say, a member of the ''Senate'', whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the other house of Congress, the ''House of Representatives''. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were far less controversial (at the time that is, opinions about HUAC, for instance, are far more critical today) and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, and [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but, having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], became unacceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it permanently in American mainstream politics.

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin. Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished senator, having incurred criticism for supporting corporate subsidies and, rather more bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and [=McCarthy=] became SnarkBait for harping on the topic for so long after it was disproved.[[/note]] Making a speech to a club in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. [=McCarthy=], a Republican, came to be treated as a major campaigning asset for his party beginning with the 1950 Senate elections, when he helped stump for several successful Republican challengers to leading Democratic senators (though how much credit he personally merited for it is uncertain). Still, by 1952, the Democratic Party had been in control of the federal government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman. [=McCarthy=] accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, naturally, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won. In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but [[NoTrueScotsman it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for McCarthy]]. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

Joseph Raymond "Tailgunner Joe"[[note]]He acquired that nickname while serving in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was the U.S. Senator who inspired the term [="McCarthyism"=]. Said word became (and remains so to this day) a byword for political demagoguery that uses the rhetoric of WitchHunt, RedScare, and PatrioticFervor to undermine the user's opponents by questioning [[MyCountryRightOrWrong their loyalty to the state]] and their personal convictions without offering proof. During his lifetime, he tried unsuccessfully to [[AppropriatedAppellation reclaim the label.]] [=McCarthy=] was an extremely anticommunist U.S. senator during TheFifties and the term derives from his methods. Due to his status as the icon of the greatest RedScare in American history, [=McCarthy=] is often MisBlamed for all the excesses of the period.

To be clear, he had ''nothing'' to do with Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the [[HauledBeforeASenateSubCommittee House Un-American Activities Committee]] (HUAC), or UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of [=McCarthyism=], but [=McCarthy=] wasn’t actually involved in those things. The big clue is that [=McCarthy=] was a ''senator'', which is to say, a member of the ''Senate'', whereas HUAC [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin (as its full name suggests)]] was a committee of the other house of Congress, the ''House of Representatives''. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-[=McCarthy=] investigations were far less controversial (at the time that is, opinions about HUAC, for instance, are far more critical today) and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, and [=McCarthyism=] represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the RedScare with [=McCarthy=] alienating other anti-communists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated, but having been co-opted by [=McCarthy=], were no longer acceptable. [=McCarthyism=] is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anti-communism remains mainstream and has bipartisan consensus), and the means [=McCarthy=] advocated, i.e. militant anti-communist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it [[UpToEleven to the extreme]] and discredited it permanently in American mainstream politics.

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin. Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished Senator, having earned criticism for supporting corporate subsidies and, bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and [=McCarthy=] became SnarkBait for harping on the topic long after its falseness became evident.[[/note]] Making a speech in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. At the time, the Democratic Party had been in control of the government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman. [=McCarthy=], a Republican, accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, naturally, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won. In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but [[NoTrueScotsman it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for McCarthy]]. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

During Eisenhower's presidency, [=McCarthy=] served on the Senate Committee on Government Operations during which he investigated the Voice of America, the U.S. government's radio program, where he ruined many careers via televised interviews that included highly personal and aggressive interrogation. He, alongside Roy Cohn (who worked as his chief counsel), also monitored the libraries in American embassies overseas and began crusading against books and authors that were considered communist, which eventually led to {{book burning}}s by [=McCarthy=] supporters at home ([=McCarthy=] didn't order any directly, it must be said). [=McCarthy=] attacked government employees, librarians and other state officials, codifying [[AntiIntellectualism the anti-intellectual climate]] of the time. It became clear that he was burning his bridges when [=McCarthy=]'s staff director, J. B. Matthews, started claiming that "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen." Even [=McCarthy=] was reluctant to support a potential breach into the First Amendment and many of his fellow senators were taken aback by this attack on the American clergy. While [=McCarthy=] is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar crusade [[{{UsefulNotes/Homophobia}} against homosexuals]], arguing by the InsaneTrollLogic that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to {{blackmail}}, the USSR could easily use them to spy on the United States and so known and suspected homosexuals had to be ferreted out to gauge their loyalty better. Some historians argue that this "Lavender scare," as it is called, actually did much more damage than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Naturally, the fact that [=McCarthy=]'s own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this).

Ultimately, an emerging new medium called television brought [=McCarthy=] down. In early 1954, Edward R. Murrow’s ''See It Now'' series broadcast an episode condemning [=McCarthy=], a risky move at the time. [=McCarthy=] appeared on a later episode to respond, predictably not addressing a single point made against him and instead [[AdHominem accusing Murrow of being a communist.]] That same year, the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings investigated the U.S. Army for potential communist subversion. The television coverage of the hearings gave the American public a good, long look at [=McCarthy=], and they didn’t like what they saw. The Wisconsin senator came off as bullying and the hearings have become known for a ShutUpHannibal moment, when Joseph Welch said, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Welch’s words were met with applause from the rest of the room.

After ''See It Now'' and the [=Army–McCarthy=] hearings, public opinion began to turn against [=McCarthy=]. Even some of the most anti-communist Republicans now saw him as a liability and wanted him to StopBeingStereotypical. That December 2, the Senate voted to censure [=McCarthy=] by a 67–22 margin, with six abstentions. The censure received unanimous support from the Democrats present, while the Republicans were split evenly.[[note]]Fun fact: the only senator not present for the vote was none other than UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy, who was recuperating from back surgery at the time. The Kennedy family was generally friendly to [=McCarthy=], and he was godfather to UsefulNotes/RobertFKennedy's first daughter, Kathleen. Out of family loyalty, JFK tended to avoid speaking about him and refused to denounce him publicly.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] dismissed the censure as inconsequential and [[NeverMyFault declared that it was the result of (you guessed it) communist subversion.]] He continued to rail against the red menace, but [[DeaderThanDisco he had lost his nationwide fame and political clout.]][[note]]Eisenhower quipped that [=McCarthyism=] was now [=“McCarthywasm”=].[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] began drinking heavily. In 1957, he died at the age of forty-eight, officially from hepatitis, which his alcoholism caused, exacerbated, or both. As [=McCarthy=] was still a sitting senator at the time of his death, a special election was held to fill the vacancy in the Senate. Ironically, his seat was taken by William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat and future opponent of UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar.

* Footage of [=McCarthy=] is also shown on the television in the movie ''Film/{{Clue}}'' not only to help [[TheFifties set the time period]] but set the stage for the plot (fear of communists/possible collusion with them motivating many of the blackmail victims and, supposedly, Mr. Boddy) -- though in the end [[ArcWords communism turned out to be ]] a {{red herring}}.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mccarthy.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350:''"[=McCarthyism=] is Americanism with its sleeves rolled."'']]

Joseph Raymond "Tailgunner Joe"[[note]]He acquired that nickname while serving in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.[[/note]] [=McCarthy=] (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was the U.S. Senator who inspired the term [="McCarthyism"=]. Said word became (and remains so to this day) a byword for political demagoguery that uses the rhetoric of WitchHunt, RedScare, and PatrioticFervor to undermine the user's opponents by questioning [[MyCountryRightOrWrong their loyalty to the state]] and their personal convictions without offering proof. During his lifetime, he tried unsuccessfully to [[InsultBackfire reclaim the label.]] [=McCarthy=] was an extremely anticommunist U.S. senator during TheFifties and the term derives from his methods. Due to his status as the icon of the greatest RedScare in American history, [=McCarthy=] is often MisBlamed for all the excesses of the period.

During Eisenhower's presidency, [=McCarthy=] served on the Senate Committee on Government Operations during which he investigated the Voice of America, the U.S. government's radio program, where he ruined many careers via televised interviews that included highly personal and aggressive interrogation. He, alongside Roy Cohn (who worked as his chief counsel), also monitored the libraries in American embassies overseas and began crusading against books and authors that were considered communist, which eventually led to {{book burning}}s by [=McCarthy=] supporters at home ([=McCarthy=] didn't order any directly, it must be said). [=McCarthy=] attacked government employees, librarians and other state officials, codifying [[AntiIntellectualism the anti-intellectual climate]] of the time. It became clear that he was burning his bridges when [=McCarthy=]'s staff director, J. B. Matthews, started claiming that [[ARareSentence "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen."]] [[EveryoneHasStandards Even McCarthy was reluctant to support a potential breach into the First Amendment]] and many of his fellow senators were taken aback by this attack on the American clergy. While [=McCarthy=] is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar crusade [[{{UsefulNotes/Homophobia}} against homosexuals]], arguing by the InsaneTrollLogic that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to {{blackmail}}, the USSR could easily use them to spy on the United States and so known and suspected homosexuals had to be ferreted out to gauge their loyalty better. Some historians argue that this “Lavender scare,” as it is called, actually did much more damage than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Naturally, the fact that [=McCarthy=]'s own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this).

* In an episode of ''{{Series/MASH}}'', Frank Burns complains that Hawkeye and Trapper drew fangs on his picture of Senator [=McCarthy=].

* Footage of [=McCarthy=] is also shown on the television in the movie ''Film/{{Clue}}'' not only to help [[TheFifties set the time period]] but set the stage for the plot (fear of communists/possible collusion with them motivating many of the blackmail victims and, supposedly, Mr. Boddy) -- though in the end [[CatchPhrase communism turned out to be a]] [[{{Pun}} red herring.]]

[=McCarthy=] first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin. Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished Senator, having earned criticism for supporting corporate subsidies and, bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre Malmedy Massacre]] into false confessions.[[note]]In fairness, [=McCarthy=] responded in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these ''specific'' charges were exaggerated, if not invented completely, and [=McCarthy=] became widely ridiculed for harping on the topic long after its falseness became evident.[[/note]] Making a speech in West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched [=McCarthy=] into the national spotlight. At the time, the Democratic Party had been in control of the government for twenty years,[[note]]Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the eightieth session of 1947–49), the White House since 1933.[[/note]] under the administrations of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt and UsefulNotes/HarryTruman. [=McCarthy=], a Republican, accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating “twenty years of treason” and, naturally, supported Republican candidate UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won. In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but [[NoTrueScotsman it wasn’t quite anticommunist enough for McCarthy]]. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, [=McCarthy=] didn’t like Ike anymore and had updated his CatchPhrase to refer to twenty-''one'' years of treason.

During Eisenhower's presidency, [=McCarthy=] served on the Senate Committee on Government Operations during which he investigated the Voice of America, the U.S. government's radio program, where he ruined many careers via televised interviews that included highly personal and aggressive interrogation. He, alongside Roy Cohn (who worked as his chief counsel), also monitored the libraries in American embassies overseas and began crusading against books and authors that were considered communist, which eventually led to {{book burning}}s by [=McCarthy=] supporters at home ([=McCarthy=] didn't order any directly, it must be said). [=McCarthy=] attacked government employees, librarians and other state officials, codifying [[AntiIntellectualism the anti-intellectual climate]] of the time. It became clear that he was burning his bridges when [=McCarthy=]'s staff director, J. B. Matthews, started claiming that [[ARareSentence "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen."]] [[EveryoneHasStandards Even McCarthy was reluctant to support a potential breach into the First Amendment]] and many of his fellow senators were taken aback by this attack on the American clergy. While [=McCarthy=] is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar crusade [[{{UsefulNotes/Homophobia}} against homosexuals]], arguing by the InsaneTrollLogic that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to {{blackmail}}, they could easily be used by the USSR to spy on the United States and so known and suspected homosexuals had to be ferreted out to better gauge their loyalty. Some historians have argued that this “Lavender scare,” as it is called, was actually much more destructive than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Needless to say, the fact that [=McCarthy=]'s own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this).

History, of course, remembers [=McCarthy=] as a wild, paranoid demagogue. At the end of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar, an attempt was made to reconstruct him, with the 1995 release of the Venona papers, which revealed that there were more Soviet agents in the U.S. government than previously believed (though not nearly as many as [=McCarthy=] or HUAC argued). The general view is that, if anything, [=McCarthy’s=] antics damaged legitimate efforts to locate Soviet agents by making the cause look irrational. (Even in his own time, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower thought so, making similar snarky comments about how the Kremlin might as well put [=McCarthy=] on its payroll.) The release of the Mitrokhin documents showed that the KGB shared a similar opinion. [=McCarthy=] had a history of mendacity, having doctored his military record to appear more heroic than he was and using that as a cudgel to attack his opponents,[[note]]His nickname "Tailgunner Joe" comes from the fact that he had flown on bombing missions as an "observer" but exaggerated that to claim he served as a tailgunner, which he used when he first ran for the Senate in 1946. During that campaign, he accused his opponents, first Bob La Follette Jr. and then Howard [=McMurray=], of war profiteering with no evidence.[[/note]] and it is more accurate to see him as someone who exploited preexisting anti-communist fervor than someone interested in dealing with actual communists in a competent fashion.

* Most works of fiction dealing with [=McCarthyism=] opt for a NoCelebritiesWereHarmed version of [=McCarthy=] rather than actually naming him. A notable example of this is ''Literature/TheManchurianCandidate'', in which the [=McCarthy=] analogue turns out to be a Soviet agent sowing discord on purpose, perhaps building from Truman’s and Eisenhower’s comments.