Fifty years ago this week, on May 2nd, 1957, US Senator Joe McCarthy died from liver disease, aged 48. Condemned by the Senate, rejected by the populace, he was physically and emotionally wrecked; it seemed scarcely credible that a few years earlier he had been one of the most recognised and feared men in the United States.
The son of a Tipperary mother and an Irish-American father, McCarthy grew up in a heavily Catholic enclave of rural Wisconsin. On the strength of a highly misrepresented war record, he was elected to the Senate in 1946, riding a wave of postwar Republican success that appeared to reject Franklin Roosevelt's liberal New Deal agenda.
After three lacklustre years in the Senate, McCarthy became suddenly famous in February 1950, when, during a speech to a Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, he produced a list of 205 names of "known communists" working for the US State Department. For the next five years he was the public face of American Cold War anti-communist hysteria, making progressively more reckless and unsubstantiated claims that there were large numbers of communists and Soviet spies inside the federal government.
McCarthy's targets were not on the fringe. Using his position on several Senate committees, including his chairmanship of the powerful Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he went after generals, statesmen and even presidents. George Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, was the object of some of his most vicious rhetoric - McCarthy held Marshall directly responsible for the "loss of China". When, at the height of the Korean War, Democratic President Harry Truman dismissed General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination, McCarthy charged that Truman had made a foolish decision late at night, when his advisers had had time to get him "cheerful" on bourbon and brandy.
As long as McCarthy's attacks were partisan, he seemed invincible. But after the 1952 election, when Dwight Eisenhower became the first Republican president in 20 years, he stepped on to shakier ground. Although Eisenhower had helped McCarthy get re-elected, it wasn't long before the Wisconsin senator turned on the new administration, on an even broader range of federal agencies, and on the US army.
His downfall came quickly. With support from the president, the army launched a counter-attack in early 1954, accusing McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, of pressuring the army to give favourable treatment to a friend of Cohn's. With McCarthy removed from the chair but appearing as a witness, the Subcommittee on Investigations was given the task of adjudicating these conflicting charges. The 36 days of hearings were viewed by a television audience of 20 million, who saw for themselves McCarthy's bullying and dishonesty. His popularity plummeted, and several months later he was formally condemned by the US Senate.
In the half-century since his death McCarthy has remained America's most hated politician, surpassing even Richard Nixon in the venom he inspires. His influence has been enshrined in the language: "McCarthyism" is a common term for demagogic behaviour, unsubstantiated accusation, and public attack on the character of political opponents.
Yet it has been McCarthy's disturbing excesses and browbeating tactics, rather than his beliefs, that most Americans have vilified. Fierce anti-communism existed before McCarthy was in the Senate and persisted long after his fall from grace. Even now, fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, it surfaces in telling places: applicants for US citizenship, for example, are still officially asked if they have ever been a member of the Communist Party.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, anti-communism was a required stance for all mainstream US politicians, in much the way that the abhorrence of "terrorism" is today. McCarthy was tapping into deeply held fears.
During his heyday, writers, diplomats, film-makers and others were blacklisted. Civil liberties were curtailed. The ascension of Maoists in China, the Soviet development of the atomic bomb, the convictions of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs for spying for the Soviets - these and other events fed a national obsession with communism that would not abate until after the carnage of Vietnam.
Both John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, liberal icons of the 1960s, shared McCarthy's hatred of communism. Bobby's first job in government was in 1953 as a lawyer on the staff of the Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy was a close friend of the Kennedy family and took two of the Kennedy sisters out on dates (Jean Kennedy, later US ambassador to Ireland, said that he warmed up by discussing communists for half-an-hour and then "kissed very hard"). Bobby refused to condemn McCarthy and quietly attended his funeral in Wisconsin.
More recently, the resurgence of the right wing in the US has led to some worrying revisionism. In 1999, William F. Buckley Jnr published a sympathetic fictionalised biography of McCarthy called The Redhunter. Another favourable biography, Blacklisted by History, by the journalist M. Stanton Evans, is scheduled for publication next year. And the popular conservative commentator Ann Coulter, who claims that McCarthy is the person from history she most admires, has written: "The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism."
How telling that in a time of intense political divisiveness, an unpopular war, and an international threat to US security exaggerated for political ends, McCarthy and the rhetoric he favoured are back in fashion.