MORE HISTORY I DIDN'T KNOW

You may recall that wingers have been defending Sen. Joe McCarthy for decades, beginning with Buckley & Bozell in 1953 and going on to Ann Coulter in 2003. What I didn't realize was that McCarthy didn't expose ANYONE at all...

McCarthy was a quiet and undistinguished senator until February 1950, when his public charge that 205 Communists had infiltrated the State Department created a furor and catapulted him into headlines across the country. Upon subsequently testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he proved unable to produce the name of a single “card-carrying Communist” in any government department.

McCarthy was reelected in 1952 and obtained the chairmanship of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate and of its permanent subcommittee on investigations. For the next two years he was constantly in the spotlight, investigating various government departments and questioning innumerable witnesses about their suspected Communist affiliations. Although he failed to make a plausible case against anyone

SOURCE:
McCarthy, Joseph R.. (2009). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved September 6, 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9049641