Nor, as a matter of fact, did his early 1950 effusions, although that was a weakness soon to be rectified. Armed with his new issue he asked the Republic campaign committee to arrange some speaking engagements for him over the Lincoln’s birthday weekend in mid-February. They gave him a fairly undistinguished list: a Women’s County Republican Club at Wheeling, West Virginia and meetings of similar grade at Salt Lake City and Reno. But if the venues were unnotable the speeches were not. He spoke without texts and there has always been some uncertainty as to what exactly he said. The best authenticated version is that at Wheeling he announced:
‘While I cannot take time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.’
The language was neither elegant nor precise, but the broad message was clear. The United States Government was riddled with Communists, and it was the mission of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, armed with the most detailed evidence, to get them out. Perhaps his cleverest trick was his appreciation that detail always sounds convincing. It did not greatly matter if it was spurious or even non-existent, provided that claim was laid to it. The detail of Wheeling was certainly spurious. What he ‘held in his hand’ might have been anything from a blank sheet of paper to a laundry list, but it was not a list of 205 State Department Communists. Nor did he have any particular attachment to 205. By the time that he got to Salt Lake City it had become 57 ‘card-carrying members’. On the floor of the Senate eleven days later it had become 81. Three months later, again in the Senate, it had climbed back to 121. ‘I am tired of playing this silly numbers game’, he replied when asked to explain the contradictions.
Immediately, the Wheeling speech was not widely reported. The Chicago Tribune, appropriately, was the only newspaper outside West Virginia to pick it up on the following day. The others soon caught up. McCarthy was launched on his five year parabola. At first the trajectory was more that of a turbo-prop than a jet. Truman did not take the onslaught too seriously—he was used to almost equally immoderate attacks from more senior Republican figures—although he did pay McCarthy the hidden compliment of writing him one of his famous unsent letters on the day after Wheeling. And six weeks later he told a press conference that ‘the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy’.6
At first the Korean War stole McCarthy’s thunder. Then it gave him a still more favourable climate in which to operate. He spent the later summer and early autumn of 1950 working quietly against two Democratic senators—Tydings of Maryland and Lucas of Illinois—who had been particularly vociferous against him on Capitol Hill. By November he had destroyed them both. He began to acquire a certain reputation for electoral omnipotence which made senators treat him with a new wariness. Senators attach a great importance to the standards of the club, but most are at least equally concerned with their continued membership of it. The general Republican mood towards him began to change. Towards the end of twenty years of Democratic power, ‘two decades of treason’ as he was later hyperbolically to describe them, the Grand Old Party was sick for power. Perhaps this vulgar huckster had found the key. Perhaps he could help to achieve it, where Landon, Willkie and Dewey, Taft, Vandenberg and Knowland had failed. They were not squeamish in its quest.
Favoured by this new atmosphere McCarthy soared to even greater heights of destructive misrepresentation during 1951. He inflicted major damage on figures of moderate note such as Owen Lattimore and Philip Jessup. He weakened the morale and self-confidence of much of the State Department. And he even forced Acheson on to the defensive to the extent of making him assure a Senate hearing that Communist China would never be recognized, and such a course was not even discussed within the Department. In June he launched a 60,000 word indictment of General Marshall. He read part of it on the floor of the Senate, and put the rest unread into the Congressional Record. Even he stopped short of claiming that the Secretary of Defense was himself a Communist, but he did claim that, ‘steeped in blood’ Marshall was a man ‘whose every important act for years has contributed to the prosperity of the enemy’. He ‘would sell his grandmother for any advantage’. How could he be believed ‘under oath or otherwise’? The effrontery of the attack was breathtaking. Even some of his normal allies were a little shocked, but, like all McCarthy’s enterprises at that time, it half worked. Marshall was off his pedestal for a lot of Americans.