Read All About It
For those who were titillated by the history, but a little unsatisfied with last year’s Good Night & Good Luck, there’s a cool little book that just came out called Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy. It’s a compact primer that details exactly what happened. (It’s interesting how the GOP was split back then almost exactly as it is today, between radicals like McCarthy and the moderate wing. It’s too bad, though, that today—unlike then—the president is down with the radicals.)
If you want more than a compact little primer on the era, may I suggest this gigantic book about McCarthy’s progenitor in the 1940s, Sen. Pat McCarran.
That would be Pat McCarran, D-NV. Let me break it down: the NV is Nevada (McCarran may have had the incipient Area 51 in mind for a preventive-detention concentration camp.) The Big D is Democrat.
Joe McCarthy was a late arrival to McCarthyism, which, as even Josh Feit knows, started with Democrat Attorney General Palmer in about 1919. FDR made political repression fashionable with the Smith Act of 1940, amd made preventive detention in concentration camps fashionable with Executive Order 9066.
HUAC (with which most public school alumnae falsely associate McCarthy) was run by Democrats through most of its history. McCarthy, with strong support from Joseph Kennedy & Kennedy's son, the senator, didn't get in the game until 1950.
Any books by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale, are useful correctives for leftist amnesia about the leftist subversion McCarthy ineptly tried to ride to power.