Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread communist subversion.[1] He alleged that numerous communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry,[2][3] and elsewhere. Ultimately, he was censured for refusing to cooperate with, and abusing members of, the committee established to investigate whether or not he should be censured. The term "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.[4][5]
For other people named Joseph McCarthy, see Joseph McCarthy (disambiguation).
Joseph McCarthy
John L. McClellan
Edgar Werner
Michael Eberlein
May 2, 1957 (aged 48)
Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.
- Democratic (before 1944)
- Republican (after 1944)
1 (adopted)
United States
1942–1945 (Marine Corps)
1946–1957 (Reserve)
Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, McCarthy commissioned into the Marine Corps in 1942, where he served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron. Following the end of World War II, he attained the rank of major. He volunteered to fly twelve combat missions as a gunner-observer. These missions were generally safe, and after one where he was allowed to shoot as much ammunition as he wanted to, mainly at coconut trees, he acquired the nickname "Tail-Gunner Joe". Some of his claims of heroism were later shown to be exaggerated or falsified, leading many of his critics to use "Tail-Gunner Joe" as a term of mockery which also alluded to his alleged homosexuality.[6][7][8]
A Democrat until 1944, McCarthy successfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 1946 as a Republican, narrowly defeating incumbent Robert M. La Follette Jr. in the Wisconsin Republican primary, then Democratic challenger Howard McMurray by a 61% - 37% margin. After three largely undistinguished years in the Senate, McCarthy rose suddenly to national fame in February 1950, when he asserted in a speech that he had a list of "members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" who were employed in the State Department.[9] In succeeding years after his 1950 speech, McCarthy made additional accusations of Communist infiltration into the State Department, the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voice of America, and the U.S. Army. He also used various charges of communism, communist sympathies, disloyalty, or sex crimes to attack a number of politicians and other individuals inside and outside of government.[10] This included a concurrent "Lavender Scare" against suspected homosexuals; as homosexuality was prohibited by law at the time, it was also perceived to increase a person's risk for blackmail.[11]
With the highly publicized Army–McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year,[12] McCarthy's support and popularity faded. He never caught a single spy. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure Senator McCarthy by a vote of 67–22, making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion. He continued to speak against communism and socialism until his death at the age of 48 at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 2, 1957. His death certificate listed the cause of death as "Hepatitis, acute, cause unknown".[13] Doctors had not previously reported him to be in critical condition.[14] Some biographers say this was caused or exacerbated by alcoholism.[15]
Early life and education[edit]
McCarthy was born in 1908 on a farm in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, the fifth of nine children.[16][17] His mother, Bridget McCarthy (nee Tierney), was from County Tipperary, Ireland. His father, Timothy McCarthy, was born in the United States, the son of an Irish father and a German mother. McCarthy dropped out of junior high school at age 14 to help his parents manage their farm. He entered Little Wolf High School, in Manawa, Wisconsin, when he was 20 and graduated in one year.[18]
He attended Marquette University from 1930 to 1935. McCarthy worked his way through college by coaching, boxing etc. He first studied electrical engineering for two years, then law, and received a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1935 from Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee.[19]
Personal life[edit]
In 1950, McCarthy assaulted journalist Drew Pearson in the cloakroom at the Sulgrave Club, reportedly kneeing him in the groin. McCarthy, who admitted the assault, claimed he merely "slapped" Pearson.[50] In 1952, using rumors collected by Pearson as well as other sources, Nevada publisher Hank Greenspun wrote that McCarthy was a frequent patron at the White Horse Inn, a Milwaukee gay bar, and cited his involvement with young men. Greenspun named some of McCarthy's alleged lovers, including Charles E. Davis, an ex-Communist and "confessed homosexual" who claimed that he had been hired by McCarthy to spy on U.S. diplomats in Switzerland.[51][52]
McCarthy's FBI file also contains numerous allegations, including a 1952 letter from an Army lieutenant who said, "When I was in Washington some time ago, [McCarthy] picked me up at the bar in the Wardman [Hotel] and took me home, and while I was half-drunk he committed sodomy on me." J. Edgar Hoover conducted a perfunctory investigation of the Senator's alleged sexual assault; Hoover's take was that "homosexuals are very bitter against Senator McCarthy for his attack upon those who are supposed to be in the Government."[53][54]
Although some notable McCarthy biographers have rejected these rumors,[55] others have suggested that he may have been blackmailed. During the early 1950s, McCarthy launched a series of attacks on the CIA, claiming it had been infiltrated by communist agents. Allen Dulles, who suspected McCarthy was using information supplied by Hoover, refused to cooperate. According to the historian David Talbot, Dulles also compiled a "scandalous" intimate dossier on the Senator's personal life and used the homosexual stories to take him down.[56]
In any event, McCarthy did not sue Greenspun for libel. (He was told that if the case went ahead he would be compelled to take the witness stand and to refute the charges made in the affidavit of the young man, which was the basis for Greenspun's story.)
In 1953, he married Jean Fraser Kerr, a researcher in his office. In January 1957, McCarthy and his wife adopted an infant with the help of Roy Cohn's close friend Cardinal Francis Spellman. They named the baby girl Tierney Elizabeth McCarthy.[57]
