In February of 1954, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was touring the circuit, giving speeches entitled “Twenty Years of Treason.” He claimed that President Eisenhower didn’t want a whitewash government and the Democratic label was “stitched with the idiocy of Truman, rotted by the deceit of Acheson and corrupted by a Red slime of a White.”

Indiana Senator William Jenner claimed democrats deliberately tried to lose the Korean War. The President’s assistant Sherman Adams charged the dems with being political sadists. Democrats cried foul. The Republican Eisenhower asked for conflict resolution. On February 10th, as he authorized three-hundred-eighty-five million dollars over the four-hundred million already budgeted for military aid, the President warned against his country's intervention in Vietnam.

When asked if he would change tactics, Senator McCarthy said “The price is too high.” He’d smeared homosexuals as subversives, liberals as anti-American, and moderates as weak-minded saps.

McCarthy’s downfall had ultimately already begun. In 1953, his committee started investigating the U.S. Army for supposed Communist infiltration. On February 18th, two generals refused to obey their summons to appear before McCarthy’s committee. They stayed away on order of Robert T. Stevens, Secretary of the Army. Undaunted, McCarthy accused the Army of rampant communism, but this time, when asked to back up his claims, he had very little to reveal.

This stunt bolstered President Eisenhower and both Republicans and Democrats who were growing weary of McCarthy’s tirade.

The public too was getting sick of him.

This turning point was strengthened when the Army revealed that McCarthy had asked favored treatment for a former aide who’d been drafted. In December, the Senate would finally censure McCarthy, an option exercised only three other times in the Senate’s history. He never recovered and died in 1957 at the age of forty-eight from an alcohol-related illness.

This will be covered in much more detail during the next episodes of Breaking Walls.