Joseph McCarthy

A First Look Inside Joe McCarthy’s Secret Files

Larry Tye | July/August 2020

Newly released personal papers and transcripts of closed-door hearings reveal both the depth of the senator’s conniving and his surprising charm.

Editor's Note: Historian Larry Tye has just written a definitive biography of the controversial Red-hunting Senator, Joe McCarthy,

The Woman Who Said “No” to McCarthy

Bruce Watson | Winter 2020

Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith was the first in Congress to stand up to the bullying of Joe McCarthy.

Wrong Turns In Korea

Robert Dallek | Fall 2010

Miscalculations and blunders by world leaders precipitated the Korean War 60 years ago.

On its 60th anniversary, the Korean War looks much like Vietnam, a pointless conflict that gained nothing for those who began it: North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, with the consent of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong. Yet it was far worse than that: The bloodletting in that corner of northeast Asia was an exercise in human folly that cost all sides in the fighting nearly 4 million lives lost, missing, and wounded, not to mention the devastation of the peninsula from Pusan in the south to the Yalu River in the north. Not a single northern or southern Korean city escaped the ravages wrought by modern warfare. Public buildings and private homes were turned into piles of rubble, while thousands of refugees fled from the scenes of battle.

The Demagogue's Downfall

Frederic D. O'Brien | November/December 2004

In 1954, the merciless Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin was finally taken down.

1954

Richard Reeves | December 1994

America looked good to a high school senior then, and that year looks wonderfully safe to us now, but it was a time of tumult, and there were plenty of shadows, along with the sunshine.

It was a very good year. Certainly it was if you were 17. I was a senior in high school in 1954, a member of the class of January 1955, at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Alsop Ascendant

Geoffrey C. Ward | February/March 1992

Americans have never been comfortable with class. We like to think of ourselves as egalitarian, meritocratic.

Debunkery—and Plain Bunk

Geoffrey C. Ward | October 1991

In November of 1962, I was living on Pinckney Street at the top of Beacon Hill in Boston, and when, on election day, I learned that John F.

Roy Cohn

Geoffrey C. Ward | July/August 1988

Joseph McCarthy’s fall from favor after the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings was precipitous enough to satisfy all but his most unforgiving victims.

Why We Were Right to Like Ike

Steve Neal | December 1985

30 years after judging Eisenhower to be among our worst presidents, historians have now come around to the opinion most of their fellow Americans held right along.

Critics charged that Ike was spineless in his refusal to openly fight Senator Joseph McCarthy.

A Postage Stamp History Of The U.S. In The Twentieth Century

Judson Mead | December 1982

Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think

FEW ARE AWARE of a major publishing project that has been sponsored by the federal government and some of our leading citizens over the past eight decades.

Machismo In The White House

Larry L. King | August 1976

LBJ AND VIETNAM

He was an old-fashioned man by the purest definition. Forget that he was enamored of twentieth-century artifacts—the telephone, television, supersonic airplanes, spacecraft—to which he adapted with a child’s wondering glee.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.