Joseph McCarthy's Wheeling List: Bogus Specificity and a CIA Break-In

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In February 1950, at a Republican women's club dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin held up a paper he said listed over 200 Communist Party members in the State Department, a tactic historians call bogus specificity. The episode argues he struck a match in a room already filled with gas: 1947 loyalty reviews of federal workers, HUAC hearings that sent the Hollywood Ten to prison for contempt, and an FBI apparatus under J. Edgar Hoover that historian Ellen Schrecker says could more accurately give the era the name Hooverism. Wire services on tight deadlines spread his claims, corrections ran days later, and Gallup polling at his peak showed about half the public supporting him.

Chairing the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations from 1953, McCarthy targeted the Voice of America and overseas State Department libraries, where removals led to book burnings, and Dwight Eisenhower warned graduates not to join the book burners. When McCarthy moved toward the CIA, Allen Dulles had agents break into his Senate office to plant forged files. His fall came after attacks on the Army over a promoted dentist led to 36 days of televised Army-McCarthy hearings, Edward R. Murrow's broadcast built from McCarthy's own footage, and Joseph Welch's rebuke over decency. The Senate censured him in less than a year. Venona decrypts later confirmed Soviet espionage, but historians including Daniel Moynihan and Schrecker note McCarthy had no access to Venona and caught almost no spies.

• McCarthy's numbers changed frequently after the Wheeling speech.
• Under a Korean War port security program, almost 3,000 seamen and longshoremen lost their jobs, often without learning their accusers or the charges.
• McCarthy first alleged a spy ring at the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth before the dispute over the Army dentist.
• Murrow told viewers that disagreement is not the same as disloyalty.
• Welch's rebuke came after McCarthy raised a young lawyer from Welch's firm and his past tie to a left-wing group.