Thread by @jaketapper

On this day in 1950 before the Ohio County Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, WV, Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-WI, claimed he had "here in my hand a list of 205 (State Dept employees) that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party..."

2/ It's unclear that the audience knew how important that speech would end up being. Frank Desmond covered the speech for The Wheeling Intelligencer.

wvculture.org/history/govern…

3/ McCarthy was on a tour of the U.S.

By Salt Lake City his "list" had gone from 205 to "57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party" in the State Department.

The number kept fluctuating because it was made up.

newspapers.com/clip/43944556/…

4/ Thus began one of the longest and shameful political campaigns of 20th century American politics.

As the New Republic wrote in March 1950, "McCarthy is suppressing evidence, distorting evidence, manufacturing evidence and misleading the...public..."

newspapers.com/clip/43945096/…

5/ Too many of McCarthy's colleagues in the Senate, afraid of being smeared as Communists themselves, were largely cowed.

Very few escaped that era looking particularly brave.

Murrow finally took McCarthy on in his famous broadcast --in March 1954.

6/ Were there actual Communists in the US government at the time? Soviet spies? Absolutely. Was McCarthy exaggerating the threat, exploiting Cold War fears to demagogue innocent people and accrue power? Yep.

7/ By 1954 the US Senate had had enough and censured McCarthy. He died in 1957.

senate.gov/artandhistory/…

8/ The one senator whose courage shines brightest from that dark era was Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, R-ME, who condemned McCarthy early, in 1950, in her Declaration of Conscience speech.

smithsonianmag.com/history/senato…

9/ legendary newsman David Brinkley’s sister worked for McCarthy. After the senator died she confessed to her brother about the “list” of Communists: “he made it up.”

10/ One of the lessons I think about the most from that era is Senate Majority Leader Bob Taft, R-Ohio, who lost the GOP nomination for president to Ike in 1952. Taft knew McCarthy was a phony but he tried to straddle the worlds of fact/decency and McCarthy.

11/ Would Taft have run for president again in 1958? Would he have voted to censure McCarthy in 1954? We don't know because he dropped dead in 1953. Coddling the Wisconsin demagogue is now a sad part of his legacy.