This is actually, the transcript of a speech that was given and lengthy at that by Harvey Klehr, close to a half hour reading.
That said, to know about McCarthy but not something revealed in his life, is the importance of the Venona project, a US counterintelligence operation to trick the Soviet spying. It went on for many years if not decades (1943-1980)
https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/ and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project Setting the Record on Joe McCarthy Straight
Harvey Klehr
Was Joe McCarthy Right?
I am tempted to start my talk by saying: “I have here in my hands a list of names.†That, of course, was the phrase made famous by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who built his political career in the early 1950s, the history books tell us, on exaggerating the extent of Communist subversion of American life. He also gave his name to a phenomenon that has become a term of opprobrium in American political life. To accuse someone of McCarthyism or to label a person a McCarthyite is not to issue a compliment. The implication is that a person so named has made scurrilous and unwarranted accusations and is engaged in unethical and sleazy maneuvers. The late Senator from Wisconsin even gave his name to the period. The McCarthy era is commonly depicted as one where America, consumed by a paranoid and irrational fear of domestic communism, went on a witch-hunt. In fact, the one work of literature that virtually every very high school student in American will read is Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, an account of the Salem witch trials, in which the main character is pushed and pressed to name his fellow citizens as witches. John Proctor’s refusal to falsely implicate innocent people leads to his own condemnation and execution. Miller wrote his play during the heyday of McCarthyism and consistently maintained that it should be read as a parable of what happens when a community begins searching for and persecuting heretics.
Since, like witches, Communist spies were largely regarded as figments of the imagination, it is little wonder that the first version of the National History Standards for High School, released several years ago, devoted an inordinate amount of time to McCarthyism as the most frightening and detestable era in modern American history. For much of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990, there was a steady outpouring of books and articles arguing that the Communist Party of the United States was a small, inoffensive group of idealists committed to democracy, civil rights and labor organizing that was demonized and persecuted by an American inquisition, headed not only by McCarthy, but also by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, and Richard Nixon, persecutor of Alger Hiss. During the 1970s revelations of FBI excesses and breaches of the law led to denunciations of Hoover, who was also smeared in an expose as someone blackmailed by organized crime because they had pictures of him dressed as a woman. (That, incidentally, is a charge we now know to have been fabricated by the Soviet KGB and disseminated by a gullible press.) And, of course, Watergate led to Nixon’s disgrace and resignation from the presidency.
Among historians, there was widespread support for the idea that that American government had vastly overestimated the threat of Soviet espionage. The convictions of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were widely regarded as miscarriages of justice. The charges by Elizabeth Bentley that dozens of government employees had given her secret data to turn over tot he Russians were derided as the unsupported ravings of a deluded alcoholic. President Truman’s imposition of a federal loyalty-security program was attacked as an unjustified intrusion on civil liberties. Fears of reds hiding under beds unleashed by liberals like Harry Truman, it was alleged, had contributed mightily to Senator McCarthy’s ability to demagogue the Communist issue.
Read more at: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/212053/setting-record-joe-mccarthy-straight-harvey-klehr
I watched the negative portrayal of Senator McCarthy in the made-for-tv movie from 1977, "Tail Gunner Joe" not too long ago. I believe it is at youtube. It wasn't bad as far as a movie goes, starring Peter Boyle but it was obviously, anti-McCarthy.
