"Have you no sense of decency, sir?" This indignant question, posed by US Army lawyer Joseph N. Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy during a congressional hearing [on June 9, 1954], marked the political downfall of a man who, for five years, had persecuted ordinary citizens, artists and intellectuals, elected officials and major institutions in his country − all in the name of warding off alleged communist infiltration.

At the end of 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Congress disavowed the crusade of a man who, riding a wave of virulent anti-communism in 1950s America, chaired a Senate committee charged with tracking, interrogating and condemning anyone suspected of left-wing sympathies.

McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, had, as early as 1950, declared war on the "enemy within" – the title of his most famous speech – making it the slogan of his campaign and, more importantly, a matter of state. He claimed to possess a blacklist containing the names of thousands of subversive agents who, he asserted, had infiltrated ministries and public agencies.

In reality, McCarthy was far from an outlier. The "witch hunt" led by the US government − with fabricated evidence, coerced confessions, summary procedures and police intimidation − had begun as early as 1919. After Italian anarchists threatened elected officials, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and a prosecutor orchestrated a series of punitive raids in 11 American cities, targeting Italian immigrants and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. That operation resulted in more than 6,000 arrests. In the same spirit, Congress established in 1938 the House Un-American Activities Committee, aimed at repressing Black activists, pacifists and socialists.

'Lavender Scare'

McCarthy, while not himself the originator of this political paranoia, nonetheless took it a step further: He became the state against itself. His prime targets were civil servants at all levels: More than 1,500 were dismissed, hundreds resigned and McCarthy relentlessly accused the State Department and the Department of Defense of knowingly harboring dangerous conspirators working for Moscow.

You have 68.2% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.