Joseph McCarthy

He was the fifth of nine children on a farm at Grand Chute, Wisconsin, and he walked out of junior high at 14 to work it. At 20 he enrolled at Little Wolf High School in Manawa and finished the course in a year. Marquette took him from 1930 to 1935, two years of electrical engineering and then law, paid for by dishwashing, parking cars and coaching boxing. He practiced at Shawano, gambled for extra money, ran for district attorney as a Democrat in 1936 and lost. In 1939 he took a circuit judgeship off a 66-year-old incumbent by telling voters the man was 73 and too infirm for the work. He was the youngest circuit judge Wisconsin had seated, and cleared the backlog fast enough to draw complaints.

He commissioned into the Marines in 1942 although his judgeship exempted him, came home a captain, and beat Robert La Follette Jr. in the 1946 Republican primary by 5,378 votes. Three unremarkable Senate years followed. Then came Wheeling, the figures that would not hold still, the Tydings hearings, the subcommittee, the Army, the television lights and the condemnation vote of December 2, 1954. BriefHistory has that record and what it did to the country. This page is about the man the record was built on.

He wrote most of the war record himself. He flew 12 combat missions as a volunteer gunner-observer and picked up the name Tail-Gunner Joe after an outing spent firing into coconut trees. He later claimed 32, the number that qualified him for a Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medals, approved in 1952 under his political influence. The commendation letter from his commanding officer he had written himself and signed in the officer's name, and Nimitz signed it as routine. The war wound he blamed on a crash and on flak was a leg broken at a shipboard equator-crossing party. He also lobbied to commute the death sentences of Waffen-SS men convicted of the Malmedy massacre of American prisoners, alleging an Army cover-up he never evidenced. In 1950 the Senate press corps voted him the worst senator in office.

Seventy senators went to the funeral, and more than 17,000 people filed through St. Mary's Church at Appleton, where he lies. The death certificate said acute hepatitis, cause unknown. Biographers now attribute it to drink, and Thomas Reeves has argued it amounted to suicide. Rehabilitation came later and from one direction: Arthur Herman in 2000 and M. Stanton Evans in 2007 argued that the Venona decrypts had partly vindicated him. John Earl Haynes, who worked through those decrypts himself, went back through the 159 people named on lists McCarthy used and found the evidence substantially established that nine had assisted Soviet intelligence. As of 2020 he was still the last Republican to win Wisconsin's Class 1 Senate seat.

Joseph McCarthy's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Housing Act of 1948 law
  Sponsored with backing from a prefabricated-house manufacturer. Truman signed it and called it emasculated 1948
• The Wheeling speech speech
  February 9, 1950. The claim that produced the word McCarthyism seven weeks later 1950
• America's Retreat From Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall book
  A Senate speech printed as a book, accusing Marshall of a conspiracy so immense 1951
• McCarthyism: The Fight For America book
  He took up the insult and printed it as a title 1952
• The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearings other
  Roy Cohn as chief counsel, Robert Kennedy as an assistant who quit after six months 1953

• 1929 aged ~21 Enters high school at 20 and completes four years in one
• 1939 aged ~31 Elected circuit judge, the youngest in Wisconsin history He had campaigned by adding seven years to the incumbent's age.
• 1942 aged ~34 Commissions into the Marine Corps despite an exemption He served 30 months as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron.
• August 1946 aged 37 Beats Robert La Follette Jr. in the Republican primary by 5,378 votes He accused La Follette, who was 46 at Pearl Harbor, of not enlisting.
• February 9, 1950 aged 41 The Wheeling speech
• July 1950 aged 41 The Tydings Committee calls his charges a fraud and a hoax Tydings lost his seat that November after a McCarthy-backed campaign that used a doctored photograph.
• 1952 aged ~44 The Marine Corps approves the Distinguished Flying Cross he claimed on 32 missions He had flown 12.
• December 2, 1954 aged 46 The Senate condemns him 67 to 22 I wouldn't exactly call it a vote of confidence, he said.
• May 2, 1957 aged 48 Dies at Bethesda Naval Hospital at 48 Doctors had not reported him to be in critical condition.

• Robert La Follette 1855–1925
  Wisconsin governor and senator who led the Progressive movement against railroad and corporate influence. defeated
• Edward R. Murrow 1908–1965
  Broadcast journalist whose reporting from London during WWII and confrontation with McCarthy set journalistic standards. broadcast against him
• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. hired as subcommittee counsel
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. declined to confront him in public
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. never voted on his condemnation
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. accused his State Department