Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe Mccarthy

by Tom Wicker

Joe McCarthy first became visible to the nation on February 9, 1950, when he delivered a Lincoln Day address to local Republicans in Wheeling, West Virginia. That night he declared, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 [members of the Communist Party] still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Anticommunism was already a cause embraced by the Republican Party as a whole; McCarthy tapped into this current and turned it into a flood. Little more than five years later, after countless hearings and stormy speeches and after incalculable damage to ordinary Americans and the nation itself, McCarthy's Senate colleagues voted sixty-seven to twenty-two to censure him for his reckless accusations and fabrications. We know today that not one prosecution resulted from McCarthy's investigations into communists in the U.S. government.

Journalist Tom Wicker examines McCarthy's ambition and record, attempting to discover the motivation for his demagoguery.

Genres: History, Politics, Biography, Nonfiction, American History

224 pages, Hardcover

First published March 20, 2006

About the author

Also wrote under the pseudonym Paul Connolly.

Thomas Grey Wicker’s respected talent as a journalist took him from his origins in Hamlet, North Carolina, to The New York Times. There he served as associate editor, former Washington bureau chief, as well as the author of the famous op-ed column “In the Nation” for thirty years. He was the author of a considerable number of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction books as well. Wicker earned his journalism degree from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 1948, and at first wrote for papers in Aberdeen and Lumberton. He wrote for the Winston-Salem Journal for eight years and The Nashville Tennessean for two years before heading up to the Times, where he eventually retired in 1991. Wicker’s famous report on the assassination of President Kennedy, written from the perspective of the motorcade following the president, has been praised as the most accurate firsthand account of the shooting.

Reviews

[Namera [The Literary Invertebrate] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lately, I've been really into American histories of twentieth-century politics.

It all started when I read All the President's Men (and watched the film, of course). Then I had to read The Final Days, which is an absolute masterpiece of nonfiction writing. The 50s-70s were clearly trying times to be an American politician.

It makes me feel surprisingly nostalgic - it seems to have been something of a golden age of politics back then, in the sense that people were shocked to hear Nixon use the word 'ass' in his personal life. Meanwhile, Trump says 'shithole' in his public life and nobody is shocked. It's kind of depressing.

For some reason I thought Wicker was alive, so it was a bit of an unpleasant shock to learn that he died in 2011. I suppose most people able to provide first-hand accounts of McCarthyism must really be dead now.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a review of his book. It's a good book, a good little biography of McCarthy. It certainly could have been longer or more detailed but that's not what it's here for. I like Wickers's writing - I'll be sure to pick up something else by him soon.

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[Matthew Kresal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise biography of Joe McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin who went on to become the infamous face of anti-communist hunting in the 1950s. Wicker begins by recounting his own encounter with McCarthy shortly before the senator's 1957 death and then traces his route into Congress. How does a chicken farmer with an exaggerated war record become one of the most infamous political figures in American history? Read this book and find out.

[Mike Barat · Rating 4 out of 5]

A different time and the same BS. How do you get elected with little influence and little money? Well in the 1940's and 1950's you accuse people and in some cases organizations of being communist, and you make up stories about how you can prove others are supporting communism even though you can't prove anything, or even prove you have the slightest bit of evidence to prove anything, and if you do it long enough other politicians and the media become scared of you. And yet this stories is inspiring. Why? Because demagogue always make that one mistake that turns the tide against them. It happened to Joe Mccarthy and it's going to happen to Donald Trump. If your looking for a book that describes Joe Mccarthy in great detail this book isn't it, however the book does good job of giving you a basic description of who Joe Mccarthy was. There's a good movie about this time period (Not so much Joe Mccarthy). by Woody Allen titled The Front which I Recommend, and I'm not a fan of Woody Allen. Nonetheless this movie did a good job of portraying the time period.

[Billhotto · Rating 4 out of 5]

joe McCarthy was an up by his bootstraps guy who lied his way to being briefly the most famous and, in a sense, the most powerful politician in the country. No doubt charming, he was reckless, careless about facts and a bully. He was also a drunk. But his search for Communists in public life dominated press coverage and made him a hero to many Americans. Wicker points out that McCarthy came late to the Commie hunting game, starting up in February 1950. He became a sensation when he claimed to have the names of 200 Commies in the State Department. He never produced the names, nor did he ever expose any Communists. He grabbed publicity then jumped to the next accusation. It was a classic example of using the Big Lie, constantly repeating the same falsehood. McCarthy's bête noir was the liberal East coast, Ivy League, effete elite. He got away with it until he went after the Army in 1954. Behind the scenes machinations by President Eisenhower and the Republican Establishment brought him down. The televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 showed McCarthy's ugly side. His drinking hurried his death in 1957.
Mcarthyism was not an anomaly. America has had a series of demagogues who play on voters' fears. However, it was not until 2016 that one of them actually reached the White House. It is no coincidence that McCarthy's top henchman, Roy Cohen, was Donald Trump's mentor.
American politics has produced a number of this type.

[Len Boselovic · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh .... McCarthy Lite. Adequate as far as it goes, which isn't very far. The narrative is so compressed that the sheer wickedness of this pathetic man never shines through. Read something like Haynes Johnson's Age of Anxiety instead.

[Fletcher Hamblen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent little book, an endeavor that merely desires to discuss Joe McCarthy as an overview, not a serious dive in to the details of his life. It’s good if you want to know about Joe McCarthy, but little more.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review title: Seen a shooting star tonight, and I thought of you
Wicker's aptly-named extended essay on Senator Joe McCarthy reminds us that his period of ascendancy was so brief that it seems a presage of modern burnouts; as Neil Young wrote, its better to burn out, like Johnny Rotten, than to fade away.

Wicker uses the term "subversion" frequently to describe McCarthy's charges against his accused Communist sympathizers and fellow-travelers.

Subversion (n): corruption: destroying someone's (or some group's) honesty or loyalty; undermining moral integrity

Wicker makes the point that in fact McCarthyism (itself now an accepted dictionary definition) was a subversion of the democratic process it supposedly was defending. He also credits McCarthy, from the historical perspective of 50 years since and with more historical documentation now declassified, with actually making some accusations containing more truth than was credited at the time. But Wicker concludes, while acknowledging his political savvy and sometimes likable personality, with the ultimate cynicism of his career.

Nothing ground-breaking or new here, but well told by a working journalist whose career was just beginning in the twilight of McCarthy's downward arc.

[Shamik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book. Learned a lot and it's a quick read, but you either have to like politics or history to really appreciate it. And since I HATE politics and love history, I give it 3/5, but I'm definitely better for having read it.