Fifties by David Halberstam

little interest in reporting how careless he was or how little it all meant to him. It was news and he was news; that was all that mattered. “McCarthy was a dream story,” said Willard Edwards, of the Chicago Tribune. “I wasn’t off page one for four years.” Edwards, with his paper’s permission, helped supply names, did research for speeches, and even wrote drafts of some speeches. Rarely did reporters make McCarthy produce evidence. Rarely, in the beginning, did they challenge him. Once at a press conference in Madison, Miles McMillin, a columnist and an editorial writer on the Journal, a paper that had taken on McCarthy, rose to ask him to name names. “You’ve charged that there are Communists at the Journal, ” McMillin said. “Name one.” McCarthy remained silent. The silence continued. At the press table Art Bystrom, an AP reporter and a friend of McCarthy, said, “Come on, let’s get on with it.” “Shut up!” Bob Fleming, another Journal reporter, told Bystrom. “I’m not going to answer that question if we sit here all day,” McCarthy said. So the reporters sat there for fifteen minutes of silence, until McCarthy got up and left the room.
    He was particularly skillful at making charges in smaller towns, where the local AP representative would pick it up and use it and it would become news even if it was not the truth. After all, a senator had said it. He knew how to use the mechanics of the journalists’ profession against them; he knew their deadlines, when they were hungriest and needed to be fed, and when they had the least time to check out his charges. George Reedy, who had to cover him for the United Press and thus had to match many an AP story, found the experience so odious that he decided to get out of journalism. “Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho—but he was a United States Senator,” Reedy said. He was nothing if not obliging: He had signals for the regulars to let them know there was a reception/press conference, with whiskey, in his room later, or that he wanted to go out with them for dinner. If they needed a story, he was always willing to give them a charge or two. If they wanted to know what the Republican leadership was thinking on other issues, he was perfectly willing to call Bob Taft from his office and ask him a few questions while reporters listened in on an open receiver.
    There was no coherent plan to his work. At one point, a NewYork publisher called Murrey Marder of The Washington Post to ask him to write a book about McCarthy’s secret plan to become President. “Joe,” Marder answered, “doesn’t have a plan about who he’s going to have lunch with tomorrow. He never has any plans.” It was a relentless search for headlines; every day there had to be a new charge, a new accusation.
    Nor was McCarthy alone. The Republican reactionaries had been arriving in Washington for some time; some, like McCarthy, had come to the Senate in the class of ’46, and others in 1948. But because of McCarthy’s success with red-baiting, the 1950 election was particularly ugly. Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, a Democratic patrician, had dared to go after McCarthy. Tydings, using a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, investigated McCarthy’s charges and called them a “hoax and a fraud ... an attempt to inflame the American people with a wave of hysteria and fear on an unbelievable scale.” Tydings paid with his Senate seat; McCarthy went after him with money from Texas oilmen, and he was successful.
    In Florida, George Smathers beat his mentor, Senator Claude Pepper, in an unbelievably ugly primary: “Joe [Stalin] likes him and he likes Joe,” said Smathers. In California, Richard Nixon, who studied Smathers’s race against Pepper, defeated Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in a campaign that was virtually a case study in red-baiting. Even in New York in an unsuccessful Senate race