Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE RISE AND FALL OF Senator Joe McCarthy

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

Contents

Prologue: More Powerful Than the President.............................ix1. Chickens, Groceries, and a High School Diploma.....................12. Days and Nights at Marquette.......................................83. Joe's First Campaign...............................................144. Judge McCarthy.....................................................205. "Tail Gunner Joe"..................................................296. One Fight Ends, Another Begins.....................................397. Defeating a Legend.................................................468. Newcomer in Washington.............................................549. Charges of Torture.................................................6410. The Speech That Started It All....................................7611. Where's the Evidence?.............................................8612. The Top Russian Spy...............................................9613. War Breaks Out in Korea...........................................10514. Revenge...........................................................11415. "We Like Ike!"....................................................12616. The Missing Paragraph.............................................13717. "I Can Investigate Anybody".......................................14618. Cohn and Schine Go to Europe......................................15819. McCarthy Gets Married.............................................16920. The Dangerous Dentist.............................................17721. Grilling General Zwicker..........................................18722. Exposed on Television.............................................19723. A Devastating Report..............................................20824. McCarthy on the Receiving End.....................................22025. "Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?"..............................23226. Censured..........................................................24127. "His Time to Die".................................................258Epilogue: Another McCarthy?............................................266After McCarthy's Death ................................................268Bibliography and Source Notes..........................................271Index..................................................................283

Chapter One

Even as a boy, Joe McCarthy was ambitious. "Joe always wanted to do something," his younger sister Anna Mae recalled in a 1970s interview. "He never kept still. He was always exploding on something."

Joe grew up in a large Irish American family on his father's 141-acre farm. The farm had been purchased for his father, Tim, by his father, who had emigrated from Ireland during the deadly potato famine of the mid-1800s and homesteaded in Wisconsin in 1855. All the McCarthys-Tim, his wife Bridget, and their seven children-helped to keep the farm going. They raised corn, oats, barley, cabbage, and hay, and had several dozen cows, a coop full of chickens, and a few horses. The 1920s were a prosperous time in America, and the McCarthys did reasonably well, although they never seemed to have any extra money.

They were a close family. The boys worked with Tim in the fields and the cattle barn, while the girls helped Bridget with the household chores. Every Sunday, even in the snows of midwinter, the family drove to the nearby town of Appleton to attend mass at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church.

When he was seven, Joe entered Underhill Elementary School, about a mile south of the McCarthy farm. It was a one-room schoolhouse in which a single teacher taught all eight grades, usually between twenty and thirty students. Joe was no scholar, but he had a quick mind and an excellent memory, and always got decent grades. He completed the seventh and eighth grades in just one year, and graduated in 1923 at the age of fourteen.

Joe was a good-looking boy whose features reflected his Irish heritage. Thick black hair topped his broad face. He had heavy eyebrows, blue eyes, and pale skin. Although he loved a good joke and laughed a lot, his expression could change in a flash from a smile to a frown.

Joe was strong physically. His father had taught him how to box when he was twelve, and he put this skill to good use in boxing matches with neighborhood boys. In his teens, Joe also liked to wrestle with his pals at church picnics. He never seemed to run out of energy and could get by on just a few hours of sleep a night. But he was dogged by a chronic health problem. From childhood on, he suffered from frequent bouts of acute sinusitis, an infection of the sinuses. It was an affliction he was never able to conquer.

The fall after his graduation from elementary school, Joe's parents expected he would go on to high school. But at that point he wasn't interested in any further education. Ready to make his way in the world, he wanted to make some money on his own. He bought two dozen chickens with sixty-five dollars he had earned working for an uncle in his spare time, fenced the birds into a corner of his father's property, and built a shed for them.

Joe sold the chickens' eggs to stores in Appleton and with the profits bought more chicks. Soon he was making enough money to buy a beat-up used truck. Making deliveries to stores in an even wider area, he increased his sales. By the time he was seventeen, in 1925, Joe owned two thousand egg-laying hens and ten thousand broilers for eating, and was driving as far as Chicago to market his eggs and poultry. The future looked bright indeed for Joe McCarthy, chicken farmer.

Disaster struck in the spring of 1928. On one Chicago trip, Joe's truck over-turned. He was unhurt, but many of his chickens were killed, which was a major setback to his business. That was just the beginning. The following winter was unusually cold, and Joe came down with a bad case of the flu after making mid-night trips to the chicken house to check that the birds weren't freezing. The flu, complicated by his recurring sinusitis, kept Joe in bed for more than two weeks. He hired some local boys to look after his chickens, but they neglected their duties, and a fatal poultry disease, coccidiosis, infected the birds. In a short time, thousands of Joe's chickens lay dead and he himself was broke.

When he recovered fully from the flu, Joe tried to rebuild the flock, but his heart wasn't in it. He had been a success as a chicken farmer, but he didn't want to spend the rest of his life on a farm. After handing over the surviving chickens to his father, he found a job as a clerk at a Cash-Way grocery store. He performed so well that the higher-ups soon promoted him to manager, then assigned him to open a new Cash-Way store in the small town of Manawa, thirty miles from Appleton.

Joe plunged enthusiastically into his duties and tried some unusual tactics to draw attention to the store. He drove along country roads near Manawa, knocked on farmhouse doors, introduced himself to the farmers and their families, and invited them to stop by the new Cash-Way. Later, he would put this tactic of meet, greet, and make the sale to good use in his political campaigns.

At the store, he shelved the merchandise along aisles instead of putting it behind counters, and urged customers to wait on themselves. This practice-standard in supermarkets today-was novel in the late 1920s, when most products were kept behind the counter and a clerk picked them out for each customer. Joe also bought merchandise in large quantities, thus getting it at better prices, and kept the store open late on Saturday evenings to increase business. Before long, the new store was operating at a profit, and in a few months it led the twenty-four-store Cash-Way chain in sales.

Joe wasn't satisfied with his success as a storekeeper. Again, he wanted some-thing more-something that would take him beyond the small Wisconsin towns where he had lived and worked thus far. He had no idea what that something might be, but he knew he would need more than an eighth-grade education to achieve it. His expanded life would require at least a high school diploma, and probably a college degree. But how could he go back to high school now? He was twenty years old, and he had heard that the Little Wolf High School in Manawa did not admit anyone over the age of nineteen.

He mentioned the problem to his rooming house landlady, and she suggested he talk it over with the high school principal, Leo D. Hershberger. The principal was impressed by Joe's earnestness and agreed to admit him as a freshman in the fall. He went on to tell Joe about a new, experimental program the school was introducing. It would permit students to advance at their own pace, depending on how hard they were willing to work.

Joe leaped at the idea and signed up for it as soon as he entered Little Wolf High School that September. He was nervous all the same. Years later, he confided to an interviewer, "The day I first walked into that classroom, and sat down with those thirteen and fourteen-year-old kids, I would have sold out for two cents on the dollar. But they all knew me pretty well [from the Cash-Way store, which had become a young people's hangout], so I got along all right."

Joe requested the hardest assignments and took on a heavy load of homework. After closing the store in the evening, he studied in his room until the early hours of the morning, snatched a couple of hours of sleep, and then downed a quick cup of coffee before opening the store at eight a.m. This demanding schedule began to tell on him, and it wasn't long before a Cash-Way official informed him he would have to choose between running the store and going to school. Without hesitation, Joe chose school.

Fortunately, he had saved enough money from his job to pay his basic expenses in Manawa. He also picked up a little extra cash by coaching the high school boxing team. But he felt a need to speed up his studies and started working at his books on weekends as well as weekdays. By Thanksgiving, he had passed his freshman tests and begun classes on the sophomore level. Early in the new year, he progressed to the junior level, and by Easter he was working on senior class assignments.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE RISE AND FALL OF Senator Joe McCarthyby JAMES CROSS GIBLIN Copyright © 2009 by James Cross Giblin. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.