Quote Originally Posted by sharrukin
Yes, Virginia, there really were Communist spies in the United States during the so-called “McCarthy era.”
What else is new? And the full list is a lot longer than your summary exposition. But doesn't it strike you as odd, to say the least, that McCarthy never got a single real or so-called Communist convicted?

The issue here is that McCarthy created and abused an atmosphere of hysterical excitement and hatred against political opponents, in particular Democrats. He came up with the issue of Communist infiltration in 1950 when his campaign for re-election threatened to turn sour. By that time Alger Hiss was already discredited; Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had already been arrested and put on trial. It was the liberal New-Dealer Truman who had, in 1947, established a comprehensive loyalty program to ferret out Communist influences in the U.S. government.

That's how someone on McCarthy's staff hit on the idea that this might be a great issue to revive Joe's campaign in the first place. McCarthy immediately said 'That's it. The government is full of Communists. We can hammer away at them.' And he did. McCarthy made 'history' by taking a genuine concern that was already being addressed and blowing it out of all proportion for his own political purposes.

His first so-called 'classified list of Soviet spies' was actually a public list of people who had been turned down by the State Department, some on suspicion of Communist sympathies, others for incompetence, still others merely for obsessive drinking of the kind McCarthy himself liked to indulge in. From that moment on, however, the money came in from all sides. And if Senator McCarthy was interested in anything at all at a personal level, apart from booze, it was money. That''s why he had no friends and everybody dropped him the moment the Senate censured him in 1957. He had no concept of loyalty except to himself.