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Tydings was up for re-election to a seat he had held since 1926. Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 vainly tried to beat Tydings on the ground that he was too conservative. McCarthy, by accusing Tydings of sympathy for Communism, succeeded where Roosevelt had failed. The campaign against Tydings included a faked photograph showing Tydings and Communist Earl Browder cheek by jowl. On other occasions, Joe has said: "You have to play rough if you are going to root out this motley crew."
The Score. The Tydings defeat made Joe a power. If he could successfully smear one of the most conservative and best entrenched Senators, was any man safe from his furious onslaught?
The Reds in Government, if any, were safe. After nearly two years of tramping the nation, shouting that he was "rooting out the skunks," just how many Communists has Joe rooted out? The answer: none. At best, he might claim an assist on three minor and borderline cases which Government investigators had already spotted. Joe tries to include himself in by saying: "We got Alger Hiss out, we got
Marzani out, Wadleigh, George Shaw Wheeler and a few others." McCarthy had nothing to do with any of them. Hiss was flushed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Wadleigh, like Hiss, was named by Whittaker Chambers. Judith Coplon (who was employed in the Justice Department) was arrested by the FBI. Marzani was uncovered by the State Department's own loyalty investigation in 1946. George Shaw Wheeler was never in the State Department, but with the U.S. Military Government in Germany; he was denounced by Michigan's Representative George A. Dondero in 1947 and eased out while facing an Army checkup.
The Nerve. On such a miserable showing as an exposer of Reds, how has Joe McCarthy created such an uproar and kept it roaring? A large part of the answer is that Joe McCarthy in 1950 had hit a highly sensitive public nerve. When McCarthy first spoke up, Hiss, whose case Truman had called "a red herring," had just been convicted, and Acheson had declared: "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." The U.S. people had just begun to realize fully the malevolence of the enemy they faced. Abroad, the West had suffered a grievous setback in the loss of China to Communism.
The public, quite correctly, thought that someone must be to blame. Joe McCarthy went into the business of providing scapegoats. It was easier to string along with Joe's wild charges than to settle down to a sober examination of the chuckleheaded "liberalism," the false assumptions and the fatuous complacency that had endangered the security of the U.S. That he got a lot of help from the Administration spokesmen who still insist that nothing was wrong with U.S. policy helps to explain McCarthy's success—although it in no way excuses McCarthy.