What should Catholics think of Sen. Joseph McCarthy?

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As I said, I had no problem with the FBI monitoring Communist Party activities. Clearly, the Internationalist aspects of Communism, particularly in that era, meant Communist Party members could be suspected of having, at the very least, divided loyalties. But there’s a delicate tightrope that a nation that believes in basic liberties has to walk, and that is never more clear when dealing with groups like the Communists, where suspicion of disloyalty certainly can be sufficient to investigate disloyalty, but should never leap from suspicion to conviction, whether formal, or through public persecution.
 
Get a copy of Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy by M. Stanton Evans. The author suffers from stiff writing which takes away from readability but documents are referenced. It’s verifiable.
 
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You mean their gay affair, and the fact that Roy Cohn died of AIDS? Cohn was probably a self-loathing homosexual and perhaps also a self-loathing Jew, given his eager participation in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial for Communist subversion. What a motley crew McCarthy, Cohn, and Schine were! Strange bedfellows…perhaps literally.

And as long as we’re playing the guilt by association game, it is also interesting that Roy Cohn was a mentor to none other than Donald Trump!
 
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“Charges” and “evidence” are not the same thing. Note the “varying worth and validity,” so we don’t even know if any of the past charges stuck.
 
Ha, yes. Cohn was a major part of the “Lavender Scare” at the very time he was having secret (but apparently not very secret among their associates) sex with a man.

On the Rosenbergs, I understand that was another case where they were painted as railroaded innocents in the wake of the excesses of the anti-communist movement, but in fact it came out that Julius, at least, was running a spy network that did obtain atomic secrets for the Soviets. I don’t doubt that there were elements of anti-Semitism in the attitudes toward them after they were identified, and perhaps even in the severity of the penalty they faced, but it does seem they were guilty (though perhaps only of knowledge and minor participation in Ethel’s case).
 
Well, (name removed by moderator), I can’t say that the YouTuber known as Jay James posted the video on YouTube with EWTN’s permssion. However, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing has been legitimately released on DVD.
 
Methinks Mc Carthy’s enemies protested too much (apologies to Shakespeare).

By the time he gave his little Lincoln’s Day speech in February of 1950 … EVERYBODY knew we’d had
disloyal people high up in the government working for the Communists.

Truman knew … and instituted both Loyalty tests and Security tests for Federal employees. Though too late to keep our atom bomb secrets from Stalin or China to be semi-negotiated into the hands of Mao.

The FBI regularly published alerts to members of congress … one of which listed the number of people
removed from sensitive positions due to dubious past associations or current problems – as well as the NUMBER of those not (yet anyway) removed, but otherwise identified as suspect. Mc Carthy mentioned that second number (about 205) but quickly adjusted it to 57 “cases” (anonymous at first … then leaked by those opposed to him) once it became apparent that an investigation might actually be done on the matter.

They say he made “wild charges”.

My take: the wildness was in the fact that there really WERE Communists (or former Communists who would not renounce the ideology even during a shooting war, Korea) still in the Government. The Venona Papers proved that he did not make them up out of whole cloth … but was a lawmaker doing due oversight. First as a minority member of the Senate without much power except the public’s outrage at Communism’s flagrant day by day subversion of the free world around the globe under Stalin (THEN in power and provocative).

They say he ruined lives in one breath … and then claim he never caught a single Communist in the next. They brushed off his charges as a red herring or his cases as part of a witch hunt. The latter term implying there was NO truth in anything he said. But people taking the 5th Amendment instead of either denying they were Communists (before or THEN at the moment) caused unease with a lot of the public.

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If there WERE people high up in the most privileged and sensitive areas of our government …

… at a time when the world was changing at light speed with atom bombs, worldwide “revolutions”

… and a re-popularity of the kind of appeasement (of Stalin and Mao) that allowed Hitler to swallow up country after country 'til the U.S. had to fight a SECOND World War …

maybe somebody should LOOK into it and recommend remedial action (as THAT was about as much power as Mc Carthy really had as a Senator … even when he ran the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations … which IMO OUGHT to take FBI warnings more seriously than to circular file (trash) them.

I really don’t see where Mc Carthy “ruined innocent peoples’ lives” … so much that a sinister caboose is added to his name forever and we must go Pavlov’s dog and snarl Mc Carthyism on cue without really knowing the story.

I mean FDR’s picture is on the dime. And a better charge might be made that HE “ruined many innocent people’s lives” by contradicting almost every point he made in his January 1941 “Four Freedoms” Speech within the year!

FDR also had a world-conquest-type (National) socialist enemy to justify HIS countermoves … but had actual power to implement them. He drafted millions into the armed services and sent them to war.
(Yet where Mc Carthy got pilloried for going after Americans … instead of foreign Communists directly) FDR declared war on Germany … before Germany declared war on the U.S.

My point is NOT that FDR shouldn’t have … (just that he didn’t get the mysterious HEAT that Mc Carthy instantly … and ever after … got). In some ways the allies barely beat Germany before Hitler was able to develop his own A-bomb (some theorize). Forgotten for a bit was that Russia and Stalin started World War II WITH Hitler prior to the latter’s “betrayal”. Russia was America’s “ally” (or pretended to be … maybe as the U.S. found it convenient to back a Russian proxy in fighting Hitler “for us” for a bit.
 
Senator McCarthy was not the only one going after known Communists. "For example, when in 1956 the FBI proposed prosecuting former White House aide Lauchlin Currie for espionage based on information developed from Venona, NSA’s director, Lieutenant General Ralph Canine, strongly objected, telling the Justice Department that anything that might reveal NSA’s success in breaking Russian codes would be ‘highly inadvisable.’ "
 
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