If Joe McCarthy had as much support back in 1956, he might have changed the course of history much more than he did anyway.
McCarthy was the object of a considerable amount of disinformation and misinformation, directed with malice aforethought. But his objective, to show that BOTH the Defense Department and the State Department were riddled with double agents and Soviet operatives, was scoring a lot of points and snaring a lot of the cockroaches.
Had enough of these DOD and State Department moles been caught in that net, the infrastructure for the protection and propagation of similar pro-Communist and anti-American tactics would not have been carried out in 1971.
But they weren’t, and the “anti-war” riots of the 1970’s were made possible. Which built the facade that protected John F. Kerry for years, until knocked down by the “Swift Boaters”.