McCarthy

McCarthy chronicles the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who led a Cold War crusade against Communists.

In February 1950, McCarthy gave a Lincoln Day address in Wheeling, West Virginia. He claimed that over 200 communists held jobs at the State Department.

Senator Joseph McCarthy hired Cohn in 1953 as Chief Counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy relied heavily on Cohn—for contacts, information, ideas, and political advice.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked Senator Joseph McCarthy for evidence to support his allegations of communists in the State Department, but he ignored her requests. In June 1950, Smith delivered a Declaration of Conscience against "the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance and intolerance. "

In 1953, the author Langston Hughes was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations to answer questions about Communist influences in his writing. The private, closed-door interrogation pitted Hughes against the Subcommittee’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn. We dramatized the actual hearing transcripts of Hughes’s testimony, made public 50 years later.

The rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose zealous anti-communist crusade would test the limits of American decency and democracy.

In 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy declared to Congress that Far East scholar Owen Lattimore was a "top Russian spy." Lattimore tried to clear his name before two congressional committees. He was eventually exonerated but those hearings took a lasting economic and personal toll on the scholar. Here's how they worked.