November 14, 1908 - May 2, 1957
Birth Place : Grand Chute, Wisconsin
Early life and career
McCarthy was born on a farm in the town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin. McCarthy's mother, Bridget Tierney, was from County Tipperary, Ireland. His father, Tim McCarthy, was American; the son of an Irish father and a German mother. McCarthy dropped out of junior high school to help his parents manage their farm and later returned to school and earned his diploma in one year. McCarthy worked his way through college, from 1930 to 1935, studying engineering and law, earning a law degree at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He was admitted to the bar in 1935. While working in a law firm in Shawano, Wisconsin, he launched what was ultimately an unsuccessful campaign to become District Attorney as a Democrat in 1936. However, in 1939, McCarthy's luck was better: he successfully vied for the elected post of the non-partisan 10th District circuit judge, becoming the youngest judge in Wisconsin's history.
Military service
In 1942, shortly after the U.S. entered World War II, McCarthy enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, despite the fact that his judicial office had exempted him from compulsory service. His position as a judge qualified him for an automatic commission as a second lieutenant, and he would leave the Marines with the rank of captain. He served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville. McCarthy reportedly chose the Marines with the hope that being a veteran of this branch of the military would serve him best in his future political career.
It is a matter of record that McCarthy exaggerated his war record. He claimed to have enlisted as a "buck private," though due to his automatic commission he entered basic training as an officer. He flew 12 combat missions as a gunner-observer, but later claimed 32 missions in order to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross, which he received in 1952. McCarthy publicized a letter of commendation signed by his commanding officer and countersigned by Admiral Chester Nimitz, but it was revealed that McCarthy had written this letter himself, in his capacity as intelligence officer. A "war wound" that McCarthy made the subject of varying stories involving airplane crashes or antiaircraft fire was in fact received aboard ship during an initiation ceremony for sailors who cross the equator for the first time.
McCarthy campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination in Wisconsin while still on active duty in 1944 but was defeated for the GOP nomination by Alexander Wiley, the incumbent. After resigning his commission in April 1945--five months before the end of the Pacific war in September 1945, and being re-elected unopposed to his circuit court position--he began a much more systematic campaign for the 1946 Republican Senate primary nomination, again challenging an incumbent, four-term senator and United States Progressive Party icon, Robert M. La Follette, Jr.
Senate campaign
In his campaign, McCarthy attacked La Follette for not enlisting during the war, although La Follette had been 46 when Pearl Harbor was bombed. McCarthy also claimed La Follette had made huge profits from his investments while he, McCarthy, had been away fighting for his country. The suggestion that La Follette had been guilty of war profiteering was deeply damaging, and McCarthy won the primary nomination 207,935 votes to 202,557. It was during this campaign that McCarthy started publicizing the nickname "Tailgunner Joe", using the slogan "Congress needs a tailgunner". Arnold Beichman later reported that McCarthy "was elected to his first term in the Senate with support from the Communist-controlled United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, CIO," which preferred McCarthy to the anti-communist Robert M. La Follette.
McCarthy enjoyed the support of the state Republican party organization, and he won the nomination narrowly. He won in the general election against Democrat opponent Howard J. McMurray by a 2 to 1 margin, and thus joined Senator Wiley (whom McCarthy had challenged two years earlier) in the Senate.
Senator
McCarthy's first three years in the Senate were unremarkable. McCarthy was a popular speaker, invited by many different organizations, covering a wide range of topics. His aides and many in the Washington social circle described him as charming and friendly, and he was a popular guest at cocktail parties. He was far less well-liked among fellow senators, who found him quick-tempered and prone to impatience and even rage. Outside of a small circle of colleagues, he was soon an isolated figure in the Senate. He was active in labor-management issues, with a reputation as a moderate Republican. He fought against continuation of wartime price controls, especially on sugar. He supported the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman's veto, angering labor unions in Wisconsin but solidifying his business base. In an incident for which he would be widely criticized, McCarthy lobbied for the commutation of death sentences given to a group of Waffen-SS soldiers convicted of war crimes for carrying out the 1944 Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war. McCarthy was critical of the convictions because of allegations of torture during the interrogations that led to the German soldiers' confessions, and he charged that the army was engaged in a cover-up of judicial misconduct.
Kennedy family and Irish Catholics
McCarthy became good friends with Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. in the late 1940s, in part because of their connection as fellow Irish Catholics. He was a frequent guest at the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port, and at one point dated Patricia Kennedy. After McCarthy became nationally prominent Kennedy was a vocal supporter, and helped build McCarthy's popularity among Catholics. Kennedy contributed cash and encouraged his friends to give money. Some historians have argued that in the Senate race of 1952, Joseph Kennedy and McCarthy made a deal that McCarthy would not make campaign speeches for the Republican ticket in Massachusetts, and in return, Congressman John F. Kennedy would not give anti-McCarthy speeches. In 1953 McCarthy hired Robert Kennedy (age 27) as a senior staff member. When the Senate voted to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954, Senator Kennedy was in the hospital and never indicated then or later how he would vote.
Wheeling speech
McCarthy's national profile rose meteorically after his Lincoln Day speech on February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.
McCarthy's words in the speech are a matter of some dispute, as they were not reliably recorded at the time. It is generally agreed, however, that he produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of known Communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is usually quoted to have said: "I have here in my hand a list of 205 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department."
There is a great deal of dispute about whether or not McCarthy actually gave the number of people on the list as being "57" or "205". In a later telegram to President Truman, and when entering the speech into the Congressional Record, he used the number 57. The origin of the number 205 can be traced: In later debates on the Senate floor, McCarthy referred to a 1946 letter that then-Secretary of State James Byrnes sent to Congressman Adolph J. Sabath. In that letter, Byrnes said State Department security investigators had resulted in "recommendation against permanent employment" for 284 persons, and that only 79 of these had been removed from their jobs; this left 205 still on the State Department's payroll. On the Senate floor, McCarthy said that while he did not have the names of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes letter, he did have the names of 57 who were either members of or loyal to the Communist Party. McCarthy stated he referred to 57 "known Communists"; the number 205 was referring to the number of people employed by the State Department who, for various reasons, had been recommended for removal by the State Department's security investigators. Since the Byrnes letter was four years old, McCarthy's numbers were equally out of date. The exact number stated by McCarthy would later become a matter of some importance when the matter was brought before the Tydings Committee.
At the time of McCarthy's speech, Communism was a growing concern in the United States. This concern was worsened by the actions of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, the fall of China to the Maoists, the Soviets' development of the atomic bomb the year before and by the recent conviction of Alger Hiss and the confession of Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs. With this background and due to the sensational nature of McCarthy's charge against the State Department, the Wheeling speech attracted a flood of press interest in McCarthy.
Tydings Committee
The Tydings Committee was a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was set up in February 1950 to conduct "a full and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or have been, employed by the Department of State." The chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Millard Tydings, a Democrat, told McCarthy at the opening of the hearings: "You are in the position of being the man who occasioned this hearing, and so far as I am concerned in this committee you are going to get one of the most complete investigations ever given in the history of this Republic, so far as my abilities will permit."
McCarthy himself was taken aback by the massive media response to the Wheeling speech, and he was accused of continually revising both his charges and his figures. In Salt Lake City, Utah, a few days later, he cited a figure of 57, and in the Senate on February 20, he claimed 81. During a marathon 6-hour speech, McCarthy fought Democratic attempts to disclose the actual names of these people. Four times during McCarthy's February 20 speech, Democratic Senator Scott W. Lucas demanded McCarthy make the 81 names public, but McCarthy refused to do so, saying: "If I were to give all the names involved, it might leave a wrong impression. If we should label one man a Communist when he is not a Communist, I think it would be too bad." In fact, McCarthy had no actual names; his evidence for this particular list came from summaries of State Department loyalty review files, from which the names had been removed. Instead he just had case numbers. Eventually McCarthy moved on from his original list of unnamed individuals and used the hearings to make charges against ten others for whom he had names: Dorothy Kenyon, Esther and Stephen Brunauer, Haldore Hanson, Gustavo Duran, Owen Lattimore, Harlow Shapley, Frederick Schuman, John S. Service and Philip Jessup. Some of these no longer, or never had, worked for the State Department, and all had previously been the subject of various charges of varying worth and validity. Owen Lattimore became a particular focus of McCarthy's, who at one point described him as a "top Russian spy." Throughout the hearings, McCarthy had colorful rhetoric, but no substantial evidence, to support his accusations.
From its beginning, the Tydings Committee was marked by partisan infighting. Its final report, written by the Democratic majority, concluded that the individuals on McCarthy's list were neither Communists nor pro-communist, and said the State Department had an effective security program. Tydings labeled McCarthy's charges a "fraud and a hoax," and said that the result of McCarthy's actions was to "confuse and divide the American people to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves." Republicans responded in kind, with William Jenner stating that Tydings was guilty of "the most brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history." The full Senate voted three times on whether to accept the report, and each time the voting was precisely divided along party lines.
Continuing anti-communism, fame and notoriety
From 1950 onward, McCarthy continued to press his accusations that the government was failing to deal with Communism within its ranks, which increased his approval rating and gained him a powerful national following. During a speech in Milwaukee in 1952, McCarthy dated the public phase of his fight against Communists to the May 22, 1949, death of former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, apparently by suicide. "The Communists hounded Forrestal to his death," McCarthy said. "They killed him just as definitely as if they had thrown him from that 16th-story window in Bethesda Naval Hospital."
Barely a month after McCarthy's Wheeling speech, the term "McCarthyism" was coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block. Block and other opponents of McCarthy and his methods used the word as a synonym for baseless defamation and mudslinging. Later, it would be embraced by McCarthy and some of his supporters. "McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled," McCarthy said in a 1952 speech, and later that year he published a book entitled McCarthyism: The Fight for America.
McCarthy has been accused of attempting to discredit his critics and political opponents by accusing them of being Communists or communist sympathizers. In the 1950 Maryland Senate election, McCarthy campaigned for John M. Butler in his race against four-term incumbent Millard Tydings, with whom McCarthy had been in conflict during the Tydings Committee hearings. In speeches supporting Butler, McCarthy accused Tydings of "protecting Communists" and "shielding traitors." McCarthy's staff was heavily involved in the campaign, and collaborated in the production of a campaign tabloid that contained a composite photograph doctored to make it appear that Tydings was in intimate conversation with Communist leader Earl Browder. A Senate subcommittee later investigated this election and referred to it as "a despicable, back-street type of campaign," as well as recommending that the use of defamatory literature in a campaign be made grounds for expulsion from the Senate.
In addition to the Tydings-Butler race, McCarthy campaigned for several other Republicans in the 1950 elections, including that of Everett Dirksen against Democratic incumbent and Senate Majority Leader Scott W. Lucas. Dirksen, and indeed all the candidates McCarthy supported won their elections, and those he opposed lost. The elections, including many that McCarthy wasn't involved in, were an overall Republican sweep, but still McCarthy was credited as a key Republican campaigner. He was now regarded as one of the most powerful men in the Senate and was treated with new-found deference by his colleagues.
McCarthy was physically violent toward his critics on at least one occasion. In 1950 He assaulted journalist Drew Pearson in the cloakroom of a Washington club, reportedly kneeing him in the groin. McCarthy, who admitted the assault, claimed he merely "slapped" Pearson.
In 1952, using rumors collected by Drew Pearson, Nevada publisher Hank Greenspun wrote that both McCarthy and Roy Cohn were homosexuals. The major media refused to print the story and no reputable McCarthy biographer has accepted the rumor as probable. McCarthy dated many women, including Joseph Kennedy's daughters; in 1953 he married Jean Kerr, a researcher in his office. He and his wife adopted a baby girl in January 1957.
McCarthy and Truman
There was considerable enmity between McCarthy and President Truman throughout the time they were both in office. McCarthy sought to characterize President Truman and the Democratic party as soft on or even in league with the Communists, referring to "twenty years of treason" on the part of the Democrats. Truman, in turn, once referred to McCarthy as "the best asset the Kremlin has," and said his attempts to "sabotage the foreign policy of the United States" in a cold war was comparable to shooting American soldiers in the back in a hot war.
It was the Truman Administration's State Department that McCarthy accused of harboring 205 (or 57 or 81) "known Communists," and Truman's Secretary of Defense George Marshall who was the target of some of McCarthy's most colorful and memorable rhetoric. Marshall was also Truman's former Secretary of State and had been Army Chief of Staff during World War II. Marshall was a highly respected statesman and general, best remembered today as the architect of the Marshall Plan for post-war reconstruction of Europe, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. McCarthy authored a book titled America's retreat from victory; the story of George Catlett Marshall, accused Marshall of treason, of "aid(ing) the Communist drive for world domination," said "if Marshall was merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve America's interests," and most famously, accused him of being part of "a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man."
After Truman dismissed General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, McCarthy, using another phrase that would become famous, charged that Truman and his advisors must have planned the dismissal during a "midnight Bourbon-and-Benedictine session."
McCarthy and Eisenhower
With his victory in the 1952 presidential race, Dwight Eisenhower became the first Republican president in 20 years. The Republican party also held a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Those who expected that party loyalty would cause McCarthy to tone down his accusations of Communists being harbored within the government were soon disappointed. Eisenhower had never been an admirer of McCarthy, and their relationship became more hostile once Eisenhower was in office.
During the 1952 campaign, Eisenhower's campaign schedule included a tour through Wisconsin with McCarthy. In a speech he delivered in Green Bay, Eisenhower declared that while he agreed with McCarthy's goals, he disagreed with his methods. Eisenhower also included a strong defense of George Marshall in draft versions of his speech, in direct contradiction of McCarthy's frequent attacks on Marshall. However, under the advice of conservative colleagues who were fearful that that Eisenhower could lose Wisconsin if he alienated McCarthy supporters, he cut these parts from later versions of his speech. The deletion was discovered by a reporter for the New York Times and featured on their front page the next day. Eisenhower was widely criticized for giving up his personal convictions, and the incident became the low point of his campaign. After being elected president, he made it clear to those close to him that he did not approve of McCarthy and he worked actively to squelch his power and influence. But he never directly confronted McCarthy or criticized him by name in any speech, thus perhaps prolonging McCarthy's power by showing that even the President was afraid to criticize him directly.
In a November 1953 speech that was carried on national television, McCarthy began by praising the Eisenhower Administration for removing "1,456 Truman holdovers who were [...] gotten rid of because of Communist connections and activities or perversion." He then went on to complain that John P. Davies was still "on the payroll after eleven months of the Eisenhower Administration," (Davies had been fired three weeks earlier) and repeated an unsubstantiated accusation that Davies had tried to "put Communists and espionage agents in key spots in the Central Intelligence Agency." In the same speech he criticized Eisenhower for not doing enough to secure the release of missing American pilots shot down over China during the Korean War.
By the end of 1953, McCarthy had altered the "twenty years of treason" catch-phrase he had coined for the preceding Democratic administrations and began referring to "twenty one years of treason." to include Eisenhower's first year in office.
As McCarthy became increasingly combative towards the Eisenhower Administration, Eisenhower faced repeated calls that he confront McCarthy directly. Eisenhower refused, saying privately "nothing would please him [McCarthy] more than to get the publicity that would be generated by a public repudiation by the President." On several occasions Eisenhower is reported to have said of McCarthy that he didn't want to "get down in the gutter with that guy.
Articles source : WikiPedia
|