Shooting Star

by Wicker, Tom

• ISBN13: 9780151010820
• ISBN10: 015101082X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Joe McCarthy first became visible to the nation on February 9, 1950, when he delivered a Lincoln Day address to local Republicans in Wheeling, West Virginia. That night he declared, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 [members of the Communist Party] still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Anticommunism was already a cause embraced by the Republican Party as a whole; McCarthy tapped into this current and turned it into a flood. Little more than five years later, after countless hearings and stormy speeches and after incalculable damage to ordinary Americans and the nation itself, McCarthy's Senate colleagues voted sixty-seven to twenty-two to censure him for his reckless accusations and fabrications. We know today that not one prosecution resulted from McCarthy's investigations into communists in the U.S. government. Journalist Tom Wicker examines McCarthy's ambition and record, attempting to discover the motivation for his demagoguery.

Author Biography

TOM WICKER began covering national politics for the New York Times in 1960. He is the author of ten novels and nine works of nonfiction, including biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Herbert Walker Bush. He lives in Vermont.

Excerpts

No wonder I moved on so promptly in 1957. Joe McCarthy may have been the most destructive demagogue in American history. As a small-town reporter obsessed with national affairs, I was certain during the years of McCarthys political dominance that he was uniquely villainous, his sins against democracy not to be forgiven or forgotten. However interminable those years seemed to me, they were in fact relatively few. Joe McCarthy first became visible to the nation on February 9, 1950, when he delivered a Lincoln Day address to local Republicans in Wheeling, West Virginia. That night, according to various and differing accounts, he declared something like I have here in my hand a list of 205 members of the Communist Party, still working and shaping policy in the State Department. Just less than five years after that speech, following December 2, 1954, McCarthy virtually disappeared. That day the United States Senatehis power base, his political bunkervoted by sixty-seven to twenty-two to condemn him for conduct bringing that body into disrepute. Every Democratic senator except John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was in the hospital, voted for what most senators believed to be a resolution of censure.* Twenty-two Republicansmembers of the party that had done the most to advance and sustain McCarthyjoined the Democrats, some with relief at the end of a political reign they had considered an ordeal. Even this climactic moment of defeat brought out McCarthys peculiar jauntiness: It wasnt, he told the reporters who had done so much to spread his fame and power, exactly a vote of confidence. He then added with characteristic bravado and exaggeration: Im happy to have this circus over, so I can get back to the real work of digging out communism, corruption, and crime. He never did. Strictly speaking, he never had.McCarthys Wheeling speech in February 1950 is one of the most consequential in ntry-region w:st="on"U.S. history without a recorded or an agreed-upon text, nor was it connected to a noteworthy cause such as an inaugural or a commemoration; instead, it resulted from ordinary political bureaucracy. The Republican Partys speakers bureau had routinely assigned McCarthy, then a little-known one-term senator regarded unfavorably by many of his colleagues, to a five-speech Lincoln Day tour that began in Wheeling and ended in Huron, South Dakotahardly major political forums. Party elders had no idea what he would say, other than the usual political balderdash; neither, probably, did McCarthy, who arrived in Wheeling with two rough draftsone concerning housing, then his Senate specialty, the other on communists in government. The origins of the second speech are undetermined but not totally obscure. As early as his winning Senate campaign against Democrat Howard McMurray in 1946,* McCarthy had used Red scare rhetoric, enough so that McMurray complained in one of the campaign debates that his loyalty had never before been challenged by a r

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Excerpted from Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe Mccarthy by Tom Wicker
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