Free Republic

In light of the recent death of Irving Peress, I dust off this one I did back in 2007… I must admit that I was unaware just how deep the calumny against Senator Joseph McCarthy was until a friend of mine, supposedly an arch-conservative, invoked the infamous Joseph Welch line “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” to decry the unfair treatment of a current political figure. My friend did not realize that Welch’s statement was no more than bluster, and has been forever (and successfully) quoted...

I’m sure many of you are too young, and the rest of you probably don’t remember the moment when Senator McCarthy’s putrid career came to an end. I remember it as if it were yesterday; I was a college student at Northeastern University, a cooperative college where you work at a course-related job for several weeks and then go to school for several weeks. I happened to be working at my co-op job at Dennison Manufacturing Company in Framingham, Massachusetts, where the company maintained a recreation area for their employees. We were at lunch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV...