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Joseph McCarthy



  • McCarthy was anti-Communist. Was he also anti-Semitic?

    by Larry Tye

    McCarthy’s reckless accusations and trampling of witnesses’ rights were offensive to age-old Jewish values, with or without overt anti-Semitism. That’s easy to say in hindsight, but was also the verdict of Jewish Americans at the time. 



  • Trump Keeps Taking Pages From Joe McCarthy’s Playbook

    by Larry Tye

    Anyone hoping the recency of Trump's conversion to Republicanism and conservatism might allow him to govern productively with Democrats should heed the example of Joseph McCarthy, who similary rebranded himself a conservative. Neither moderated because their political survival depended on extremism.



  • How Eisenhower Secretly Pushed Back Against McCarthyism

    To the end of his life, David A. Nichols says, “Eisenhower never admitted that the White House was behind this.” Yet he couldn’t help but gloat a bit in private. On at least one occasion, he reportedly repeated a joke that “it’s no longer McCarthyism, it’s McCarthywasm.” 



  • Philip Jenkins: Joe McCarthy Was No Witch Hunter

    Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.Language speaks us. Much as I hate quoting that post-modern cliché, it captures the truth that certain words and phrases become so deeply inlaid in our everyday conversation that we are scarcely able to realize their ideological slant.As a prime example, I offer the wave of investigations that the United States and other countries undertook into Communist subversion and espionage in the Cold War years. Well, that description is a little wordy, so let's just use the convenient short-hand that has become so standard: the McCarthy witch hunts....Real witches, by definition, did not exist....