February 8, 2026

On February 9, 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) stood up in front of the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, at a gathering to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The senator waved a piece of paper and later recalled telling the audience: “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” He said he didn’t have time to share the names of all those individuals, but he assured the audience that the Democratic administration of President Harry S. Truman was refusing to investigate “traitors in the government.”

Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was busy trying to hammer together the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Marshall Plan to provide aid to European countries rebuilding after World War II, later said McCarthy’s Wheeling speech was a good representation of the senator’s work. It was “the rambling, ill-prepared result of his slovenly, lazy, and undisciplined habits.”

McCarthy was an undistinguished junior senator running for reelection and needed an issue. With his dramatic statement, he found it in attacks on the postwar rules-based international order those like Acheson were trying to build. The staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune, whose editor hated the idea of using American resources to help foreign governments, trumpeted the story and threw its weight behind the idea that Democrats were trying to destroy the United States.

The next day, McCarthy pledged to share the names of “57 card-carrying Communists” in the State Department with Acheson, so long as the secretary would let Congress investigate the loyalty records of the people in his department. Then McCarthy telegraphed Truman, charging him with protecting communists in government. The Chicago Tribune put the accusations on the front page, and McCarthy’s office sent out copies of his missive. “Failure on your part will label the Democratic party as being the bedfellow of international Communism,” McCarthy wrote.

McCarthy’s critics pointed out that he never produced any evidence of his wild claims, but their outrage gained far less attention than the claims themselves. He yelled, he made crazy accusations, he leaked fragments of truth that misrepresented reality, he hectored and badgered. He perfected the art of grabbing headlines and then staying ahead of the fact-checkers. By the time reporters called ...