The Senator Who Had No List | Joseph McCarthy's Four-Year War on America

In February 1950, a relatively obscure senator from Wisconsin stood up in a West Virginia hotel ballroom, held up a piece of paper, and claimed he had a list of 205 communists working inside the United States State Department. He had no list. He had a piece of paper and a number he had invented, and within weeks that number had made him the most feared politician in America. For four years, Joseph McCarthy destroyed careers without evidence, intimidated institutions without legal authority, and made an entire country afraid to disagree with him — while senators who knew he was lying stayed silent, journalists who knew he was lying reported his charges as news, and the executive branch of the United States government calculated, repeatedly, that the cost of stopping him was higher than the cost of letting him continue. This documentary reconstructs McCarthy's rise from obscurity to the cover of every newspaper in the country, examines the specific fabrications he built his reputation on and why they were never effectively challenged until it was too late, tells the full story of Edward R. Murrow's televised confrontation and the Army-McCarthy hearings that finally broke him, and reckons with the permanent damage McCarthyism did to American civil liberties, foreign policy expertise, and the culture of political expression — damage that outlasted McCarthy himself by decades. #josephmccarthy, #mccarthyism, #coldwarhistory, #redscare, #edwardrmurrow, #armymccarthyhearings, #huac, #hollywoodblacklist, #americanhistory, #senatehearings, #josephwelch, #cointelpro, #declassified, #governmentsecrets, #civiliberties, #statedepartment, #koreanwar, #communism, #coldwar, #ushistory Sources: U.S. Senate Historical Office, "Joseph McCarthy": https://www.senate.gov/senators/Featu... Army-McCarthy Hearings transcripts, 1954, National Archives: https://www.archives.gov/legislative/... Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton University Press, 1998) David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (Oxford University Press, 2005) Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (Random House, 2012) Fred Friendly, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control (Random House, 1967) Church Committee Final Report, 1976: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/s... National Security Archive, McCarthy-era documents: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu