The time line of Joseph McCarthy.

new Senator, to lead the fight against continuation of wartime sugar controls.1950, February 9 - McCarthy made an electrifying speech at Wheeling, West VA, that he had a list of Communists in the State Department. By July he was a major political force. John F. Kennedy told Harvard students that "he knew Joe pretty well, and he may have something." In February 1952, John Kennedy called McCarthy a "great American patriot." In 1953 Bobby Kennedy joined McCarthy's staff and McCarthy was godfather to Bobby's first child. Bobby was always loyal to Joe.1951, June 14 - McCarthy gave a brilliant speech dissecting the career of General George Catlett Marshall ("A living lie") and his mistakes in World War II. Congressional Record, 82nd Congress pp 6556-6603. It was published as Retreat From Victory, NY:Devin-Adair, 1951. Here is a link to his book online - America's Retreat From Victory, The Story of George C. Marshall Here is a link to a brief summary of McCarthy's speech - McCarthy's June 14, 1951 speech on MarshallBy 1953 - McCarthy was credited with defeating a dozen Democrat senators including Senate majority leader Ernst McFarland, majority whip Francis Myers of PA, powerful 4-term Senator Millard Tydings of MD, Scott Lucas of IL, and Elbert Thomas of UT. McCarthy almost single-handedly destroyed the Democrat party and they vowed revenge. A group of left-wing assassins created a group called the Clearing House to smear McCarthy. They got much of their information from columnist Jack Anderson.1953 - Joe McCarthy became Chairman of the Committee on Government Operations. His reputation rests almost solely on the events of 1953. In the spring, he investigated waste and mismanagement at Voice of America. In the summer, he investigated the State Department overseas information libraries and 30,000 pro-Communist books were withdrawn from them. In the fall, he investigated the Army and the Defence Department focusing on the spy rings at Ft. Monmouth, NJ. That was where the Rosenbergs had infiltrated US atomic secrecy. A few years later, a Democrat Congress decided Ft. Monmouth was so compromised by Soviet penetration that it had to be shut down.1954 - The 2 month long Army-McCarthy Hearings were watched by 20 million people on television. McCarthy investigated an Army dentist named Irving Peress who took the 5th amendment 20 times in connection with his affiliation with the Communist Party. In its report on the Peress case, the McClellan Committee said that "some 48 errors of more than minor importance were committed by the Army in connection with the commissioning, transfer, promotion, and honourable discharge of Irving Peress." As a result, the Army made some sweeping changes in its security program, including a policy statement that said "the taking of the Fifth Amendment by an individual queried about his Communist affiliations is sufficient to warrant the issuance of a general discharge rather than an honourable discharge.” The Army counter charged on March 11 that Roy Cohn, a McCarthy committee staff member had tried to get extra passes for a former staffer David Schine. The Hearings concluded that McCarthy himself had nothing to do with it, but the committee also concluded that Army Secretary Robert Stevens and Army Counsel John Adams "made efforts to terminate or influence the investigation and hearings at Fort Monmouth," and that Adams "made vigorous and diligent efforts" to block subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board "by means of personal appeal to certain members of the [McCarthy] committee."The State Department's Owen Lattimore was the man that McCarthy made the most allegations against. McCarthy went so far as to say that he would stake his entire reputation on the question of whether Lattimore was a Communist agent. Now, of course, we have absolute proof that McCarthy was right.During McCarthy's entire career "1947 to 1958 no American citizen was interrogated without benefit of legal counsel, none was arrested or detained without due judicial process, and no one went to jail without trial." (A. Herman, p 3) The Communist Party was not outlawed and being a member was not a crime.July 30, 1954, Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing McCarthy of conduct "unbecoming a member of the United States Senate." Flanders two months earlier had told the Senate that McCarthy's "anti-Communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the hearts of any defenceless minority." When a special session of the Senate convened on November 8, 1954, these were two charges to be debated and voted on: 1) That Senator McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" in 1952 with the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections that was looking into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with a resolution for his expulsion from the Senate; and 2) That in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Senator McCarthy had "intemperately abused" General Ralph Zwicker. These were both bogus charges. No one has to voluntarily come before a Senate Committee, least of all a Senator. The Zwicker count was dropped at the last moment. Before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 21, 1957, Zwicker's own assessment of his testimony before McCarthy on February 18, 1954, was: "I think there are some circumstances … that would certainly tend to give a person the idea that perhaps I was recalcitrant, perhaps I was holding back, and perhaps I wasn't too cooperative.... I am afraid I was perhaps overcautious and perhaps on the defensive, and that this feeling … may have inclined me to be not as forthright, perhaps, in answering the questions put to me as I might have been otherwise." Perhaps because the charges were so bogus, perhaps because he wanted publicity, Joe McCarthy avoided several opportunities to dismiss the censure resolution (which was so poorly worded that it didn't even have the word 'censure' in it). He welcomed a vote. It went against him. Although meaningless in itself, it gave the liberal press the excuse to ignore and/or bash McCarthy the rest of his life. In June 1953, McCarthy was a normal Senator with a 35 percent favourable rating and 30 percent unfavourable. In January 1954 he was 50 percent favourable; in March he had 46 favourable, 36 against. Then the liberal media did a hatchet job on him and in August 1954 he had 36 percent favourable and 51 percent unfavourable rating. McCarthy retained about 35 percent favourable ratings throughout the rest of his life. 1957, May 2 - Joseph R. McCarthy died from acute hepatitis.