It was not an especially large event. On Thursday February 9th, 1950, 275 guests gathered

in the colonnade room of the McClure Hotel at the corner of Market in 12th Streets in

Wheeling, West Virginia. The occasion, a Lincoln Day dinner, the speaker, Senator Joseph

McCarthy of Wisconsin, his text, American Carnage. In his address to the Ohio County Republican

Women's Club, McCarthy said, today we are engaged in a final all-out battle between

communist atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the

time. And ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down. They are truly down. McCarthy was something

new in modern political life, a freelance performer who grasped what many ordinary Americans feared,

and who had direct access to the media of the day. He exploited the privileges of power and

prominence without regard to its responsibilities. To him, politics was not about the substantive,

but the sensational. The country feared communism and McCarthy knew it, and he fed those fears with

years of headlines and hearings. A master of false charges of conspiracy tinge rhetoric, and of

calculated disrespect for conventional figures, from Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to George

C. Marshall. McCarthy could distract the public, play the press, and change the subject, all

while keeping himself at center stage. McCarthy held the country in his thrall for four years.

Slowly, painfully slowly, the nation turned on him, but it took a long time. In retrospect, an

essential signpost in the rebellion against demagoguery came at 1030 on the evening of Tuesday,

March 9, 1954, when CBS broadcast an episode of Edward R. Murrow's See It Now. Its subject,

Senator McCarthy. Its means of storytelling, images, and recordings of McCarthy's own words.

At the conclusion of the report, Murrow spoke more in sorrow than in anger.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not

proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear,

...