Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joseph McCarthy

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.

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.

Publishers Weekly

America's most notorious demagogue emerges as less a fanatic than an opportunist in this lively political biography. Longtime New York Times political writer Wicker, author of well-received studies of Eisenhower and other presidents, notes that the 1950 speech that catapulted McCarthy to fame, in which he claimed to have a list of 205 Communists in the State Department, was a last-minute substitute for a talk on housing policy. When the speech drew unexpected media attention, the obscure Wisconsin senator deployed his lifelong talent for self-promotion and political theater to keep himself in the headlines. Wicker considers McCarthy, who uncovered not a single Communist, "a latecomer to, and virtually a nonparticipant in the real anticommunist wars" that continued after his downfall. Wicker situates McCarthyism within the prevailing climate of Cold War tensions, anticommunist paranoia and conservative animus against organized labor and New Deal liberalism. Against this backdrop McCarthy appears a human figure, undone by his own bullying manner, alcoholism and hubris in antagonizing powerful foes in the Senate and Eisenhower administration. Although Wicker's take on McCarthy isn't groundbreaking, he combines insightful political history with a deft character study to craft a wonderful introduction to this crucial American figure. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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.