Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Joseph McCarthy
Newly released personal papers and transcripts of closed-door hearings reveal both the depth of the senator’s conniving and his surprising charm.
Editor's Note: Historian Larry Tye has just written a definitive biography of the controversial Red-hunting Senator, Joe McCarthy,
Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith was the first in Congress to stand up to the bullying of Joe McCarthy.
Miscalculations and blunders by world leaders precipitated the Korean War 60 years ago.
On its 60th anniversary, the Korean War looks much like Vietnam, a pointless conflict that gained nothing for those who began it: North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, with the consent of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong. Yet it was far worse than that: The bloodletting in that corner of northeast Asia was an exercise in human folly that cost all sides in the fighting nearly 4 million lives lost, missing, and wounded, not to mention the devastation of the peninsula from Pusan in the south to the Yalu River in the north. Not a single northern or southern Korean city escaped the ravages wrought by modern warfare. Public buildings and private homes were turned into piles of rubble, while thousands of refugees fled from the scenes of battle.
In 1954, the merciless Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin was finally taken down.
America looked good to a high school senior then, and that year looks wonderfully safe to us now, but it was a time of tumult, and there were plenty of shadows, along with the sunshine.
It was a very good year. Certainly it was if you were 17. I was a senior in high school in 1954, a member of the class of January 1955, at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Americans have never been comfortable with class. We like to think of ourselves as egalitarian, meritocratic.
In November of 1962, I was living on Pinckney Street at the top of Beacon Hill in Boston, and when, on election day, I learned that John F.
Joseph McCarthy’s fall from favor after the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings was precipitous enough to satisfy all but his most unforgiving victims.
30 years after judging Eisenhower to be among our worst presidents, historians have now come around to the opinion most of their fellow Americans held right along.
Critics charged that Ike was spineless in his refusal to openly fight Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think
FEW ARE AWARE of a major publishing project that has been sponsored by the federal government and some of our leading citizens over the past eight decades.
LBJ AND VIETNAM
He was an old-fashioned man by the purest definition. Forget that he was enamored of twentieth-century artifacts—the telephone, television, supersonic airplanes, spacecraft—to which he adapted with a child’s wondering glee.
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