TBP:
What makes you think I have not read McCarthy and His Enemies? I read that book more than 30 years ago and I still have a copy in my personal collection.
I also have about two dozen other books re: McCarthy — plus several doctoral dissertations.
I also have numerous FBI files on McCarthy and on persons connected to McCarthy such as former FBI Special Agent Don Surine) and Roy Cohn. I also have the FBI file entitled “Alleged Communists in The State Department” which is devoted to analyzing the accusations which McCarthy made.
I also have the FBI file on Samuel Klaus (the person who wrote the State Department memo which McCarthy relied upon for many of his accusations). And I have the FBI files on Klaus’s superiors in the State Department.
This is what makes my blood boil. McCarthy admirers (such as yourself) always ASSUME that their perceived critics are ignorant fools who would instantly recognize their alleged error if only they would read one specific book.
Meanwhile, however, those same admirers usually have not bothered to read anything other than material which conforms to what they already believe. Instead, you apparently think that no scholar or researcher has ever done any careful examination of available evidence.
I suggest YOU read the various articles and books written by Dr. John Earl Haynes (sometimes with co-author Harvey Klehr). Both of them are very prominent and respected scholars of the McCarthy period. They have devoted their entire careers to careful examination of the McCarthy period in our history. If you can refute what they have presented, THEN by all means — let’s have your EVIDENCE!
Otherwise, stop pretending that McCarthy was “dead on” or that his statements were “a lot more supported than his detractors claim”. Lastly, I suggest you obtain the relevant FBI investigative files about McCarthy’s charges. You will discover just how often McCarthy lied or grossly mis-represented the actual factual evidence.
As former FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere observed in one interview:
“The problem was that McCarthy lied about his information and figures. He made charges against people that weren’t true. McCarthyism harmed the counterintelligence effort against the Soviet threat because of the revulsion it caused.” [The Real Joe McCarthy, Wall Street Journal, 4/22/08, pA25
Also review the comments made by one of McCarthy’s allies and confidants, i.e. conservative columnist Ralph DeToledano:
“Now when McCarthy started out, he knew very little on this subject. He’d got most of his education in the public eye, which is no way to get an education on something as touchy, as sensitive as this. But he was sincere in his anti-Communism, I mean, people tried to say, oh he’s all a phony, no he was very sincere on it. But he had to learn and as he moved along a whole bunch of people who’d been in this fight for years, myself included, were kind of dragged in to straighten him out, to give him material... But he was the kind of a person, you know, you’d give him material and so on, but somehow it would get sort of confused or mixed up...
Now, a number of us were advising him on how to handle that and he agreed to everything we said and then he did just the opposite. And all he did was to make his major supporters in the Senate turn on him.”