The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism

For five long years in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthys anti-Communist crusade dominated the American scene, terrified politicians, and destroyed the lives of thousands of U.S. citizens. In The Age of Anxiety, now updated with a new afterword, Johnson tells this monumental story through the lens of its relevance to our own time, when the current administration has created a culture of fear that again affects American behavior and attitudes. He believes now, as then, that our civil liberties, our Constitution, and our nation are at stake as we confront the ever more difficult task of balancing the need for national security with that of personal liberty.

The ListI have here in my hand.Thursday afternoon was overcast, the temperature hovering just above freezing, when the black-haired, heavyset man carrying a bulging, battered tan briefcase boarded a Capital Airlines plane for the two hundred-seventeen-mile flight from Washington's National Airport to Wheeling, West Virginia. "Good afternoon, Senator McCarthy," he heard the stewardess say after he took his seat. He looked startled, then pleased, not realizing the stewardess had been waiting to greet him after noticing a senator's name on her passenger list. "Why, good afternoon," he replied, flashing a broad smile. "I'm glad somebody recognizes me."There was no false modesty in his remark. On February 9, 1950, Joe McCarthy was neither a household name nor a recognizable public face. In four years as a freshman senator, a position he held by virtue of the 1946 Republican sweep of both houses of Congress, his record was so undistinguished that in a recent poll Washington correspondents had voted him America's worst senator.As he boarded the plane, McCarthy's career was in shambles. In his home state of Wisconsin, critics were calling him the "Pepsi-Cola kid" because of reports that he had taken $10,000 from a manufacturer of prefabricated housing and obtained an unsecured loan of $20,000 from a lobbyist for Pepsi-Cola. Then it was disclosed that he recklessly lost the money speculating on soybean futures.A year prior, McCarthy, a lawyer, had come close to being disbarred by the Wisconsin State Board of Ethics Examiners; he had run for the U.S. Senate while holding a state judicial office, a practice deemed both unethical and illegal. The board found that he had acted "in violation of the constitution and laws of Wisconsin," but dismissed a petition to discipline him by concluding that his infraction was "one in a class by itself which was not likely to be repeated."McCarthy's reply was contemptuous. Paraphrasing the board's ruling, he mocked, "Joe was a naughty boy, but we don't think he'll do it again."He was also in trouble in Washington.In a clubbish Senate that relied on hoary tradition and deferential collegiality, on rigid seniority and elaborate courtesy, his repeated violations of Senate rules and customs had lost him the respect of influential colleagues in both parties and denied him a place among the players who would shape the legislative future. Already he had alienated both Republican and Democratic colleagues by lashing out during floor debates with false accusations against them. Once, in the spring of 1947, he so enraged two fellow Republicans, Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont and Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire, that both arose in protest and, claiming personal privilege, accused McCarthy of having falsified their positions. This came after McCarthy told the Senate that both Flanders and Tobey had just informed him that they intended to introduce a "fictitious amendment" designed to "deceive the housewife" on a bill t

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Excerpted from The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism by Haynes Johnson
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