In the years following WW2, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West became increasingly intense, generating, particularly in America, fear and anxiety over the goals and tactics of international communism. Chief among the political figures who attempted to capitalize on the fear was Joseph R. McCarthy (1910-58), the junior senator from Wisconsin. who, on the heels of the Hiss-Chambers Case, charged that the U.S. State Department was riddled with Communist agents. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950, he held up a sheet of paper, which he asserted contained the names of 205 Communists working and "shaping policy in the State Department." Later, he reduced this number to 57, but by that time his campaign to ferret out Communists in government was well under way.

Challenged by a Senate committee to substantiate his charges, McCarthy named Owen Lattimore, a specialist in Far East affairs, but not a State Department employee, as "Moscow's top spy." The committee, headed by Senator Millard Tydings, concluded that McCarthy's accusation was fraudulent. When Tydings ran for reelection, McCarthy, by now a nationally known figure, campaigned heavily against him. Tydings lost the election.

Heading a senatorial subcommittee on investigations, McCarthy conducted a series of hearings that expanded his targets from real or imagined communists to all those who were "soft on communism," a characterization that he applied to the Democratic administration of President Harry S. Truman. In a remarkably short period of time, McCarthy had become an immensely powerful, popular political figure. Without ever proving any of his allegations, he had won the hearts of many working-class Americans, who applauded his attacks on the liberal, elite Northeast establishment.

With the Republican victory of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, McCarthy's committee, the chief counsel of which was Roy Cohn, turned its attention to communist subversion within the army. The televised hearing of the army investigation reached its climax in June 1952, when the army's special prosecutor, Joseph Welch, responded to a McCarthy attack with the words, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Welch's remark was the most dramatic expression of a recognition among Republicans and Democrats that McCarthy had become a menace to American democracy. In December 1954, he received a powerful censure from the Senate, from which he never recovered. Three years later, the always hard drinking senator died of alcoholism at the age of 48. His legacy is the word McCarthyism, which describes a climate of intimidation and paranoia, in which unsubstantiated charges go unchecked in the name of patriotism.

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