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Overview
The story of Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to unprecedented power and the decline of his influence is a dramatic one. Richard Rovere documents the process by which a clever, power hungry individual came to mislead and manipulate members of Congress and the American public and to damage countless lives. A new foreword for this edition by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. places the book in historical context and relates it to current issues in American public life.
"...a brilliant essay in contemporary history, overflowing with wit and perception."--Arthur M. Schlesinger
Synopsis
"The definitive job, and I can't imagine what else there is to say about him."—Walter Lippman
"This is an appraisal without apology. If its judgments are uncompromising, they are also given without rancor, indeed with an air of almost sympathetic curiosity about the phenomenon that was McCarthy. . . . It is no surprise that [Rovere's] book is a vividly written, sophisticated recreation of a political episode whose manic qualities already begin to seem unbelievable."—Anthony Lewis
Library Journal
In this "hard-hitting account," Rovere shows how "McCarthy terrorized and silenced routine jobholders, great political and military figures, artists and scientists, and yet vanished abruptly as a political force three years before he died" (LJ 6/15/59).