The Press: The Scoop That Wasn't

When Senator McCarthy was riding highest in 1953, a flush-faced man named Paul Hughes held out a bright promise to some of the Senator's bitterest foes. The promise: he could unhorse McCarthy with a dossier of "proof" that the Senator's investigators were resorting freely to burglary, blackmail, bribery and frame-ups to serve McCarthy's ends. Last week Hughes went on trial in a Manhattan federal courtroom on a charge of perjury, in what, a U.S. attorney called "one of the most fantastic schemes to make money in the annals of modern political intrigue."

Before the...

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