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Before there was Joe McCarthy, there was Martin Dies Jr, Congressman from Texas, who headed ut the House Committee of Unamerican Affairs. Dies started out as a very liberal Democrat representing the Texas delegation as an “at-large” Representative (this was in the days before “one man, one vote”). By 1938, he was so appalled at the excesses of the New Deal, and the total infiltration of the US government by Reds and Soviet activists, that he swung around and was opposing FDR on practically every front. During this same period, the once Republican faction called the “Progressives” were becoming even more Communist than Stalin, and since there was no Democrat party at all in Wisconsin during those lean years, the Progressives in Wisconsin took on the role of opposition to the real Republicans. Joe McCarthy, like so many idealistic youth, took up with the Progressives as a young man.

Being on the battle front changed young Joe, and he returned to Wisconsin a fiery and angry man, having shifted away from the Progressive view to the more righteous Republican position on Communism and what it had already done to America. Concurrently, the Progressive party had collapsed completely in Wisconsin, and the foundations of the renewed Democratican party were formed, drawing their cadre from the Progressive ranks.

A little-known fact (or at least one little known by most liberals) is that Joe McCarthy and Joe Kennedy’s boys, John and Bobby, were close personal friends in those early years in the Senate, and Bobby was one of the fleet young fellows who ferreted out the facts of the infiltration of Red influence at every level of the State Department and Department of Defense. Which makes the defection of Ted Kennedy even more curious. Surely he was aware of what his brothers were doing, aiding and abetting the anti-Communist activities of Joe McCarthy. Does Ted so despise the heroic achievements of his brothers in their younger years?