Joseph McCarthy: Difference between revisions

|type of villain = Hypocritical Paranoid Fearmonger

|goals = Rid the U.S. Government of secret communists (failed)

|hobby = Accusing people of being communists}}

{{Quote|Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness...let us not assassinate this lad further, senator.  You've done enough.  Have you no sense of decency, sir?  At long last, have you left no sense of decency?|Joseph N. Welch's infamous remark during the Army-McCarthy hearings.}}

In his book ''The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI'', journalist Ronald Kessler quoted former FBI agent Robert J. Lamphere, who participated in all the FBI’s major spy cases during the McCarthy period, as saying that FBI agents who worked counterintelligence were aghast that FBI Director [[J. Edgar Hoover]] initially supported McCarthy. “McCarthyism did all kinds of harm because he was pushing something that wasn’t so,” Lamphere told Kessler. The VENONA intercepts showed that over several decades, “There were a lot of spies in the government, but not all in the State Department,” Lamphere said. However, “The problem was that McCarthy lied about his information and figures. He made charges against people that weren’t true. McCarthyism harmed the counterintelligence effort against the Soviet threat because of the revulsion it caused. All along, Hoover was helping him.”

==Biography==

Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, McCarthy commissioned in to the Marine Corps in 1942, where he served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron. Following the end of [[World War II]], he attained the rank of major. He volunteered to fly twelve combat missions as a gunner-observer, acquiring the nickname "Tail-Gunner Joe". Some of his claims of heroism were later shown to be exaggerated or falsified, leading many of his critics to use "Tail-Gunner Joe" as a term of mockery.