Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy [Hardcover]

Tom Wicker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2006

Joe McCarthy first became visible to the nation on February 9, 1950, when he delivered a Lincoln Day address to local Republicans in Wheeling, West Virginia. That night he declared, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 [members of the Communist Party] still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Anticommunism was already a cause embraced by the Republican Party as a whole; McCarthy tapped into this current and turned it into a flood. Little more than five years later, after countless hearings and stormy speeches and after incalculable damage to ordinary Americans and the nation itself, McCarthy's Senate colleagues voted sixty-seven to twenty-two to censure him for his reckless accusations and fabrications. We know today that not one prosecution resulted from McCarthy's investigations into communists in the U.S. government.

Journalist Tom Wicker examines McCarthy's ambition and record, attempting to discover the motivation for his demagoguery.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

America's most notorious demagogue emerges as less a fanatic than an opportunist in this lively political biography. Longtime New York Times political writer Wicker, author of well-received studies of Eisenhower and other presidents, notes that the 1950 speech that catapulted McCarthy to fame, in which he claimed to have a list of 205 Communists in the State Department, was a last-minute substitute for a talk on housing policy. When the speech drew unexpected media attention, the obscure Wisconsin senator deployed his lifelong talent for self-promotion and political theater to keep himself in the headlines. Wicker considers McCarthy, who uncovered not a single Communist, "a latecomer to, and virtually a nonparticipant in the real anticommunist wars" that continued after his downfall. Wicker situates McCarthyism within the prevailing climate of Cold War tensions, anticommunist paranoia and conservative animus against organized labor and New Deal liberalism. Against this backdrop McCarthy appears a human figure, undone by his own bullying manner, alcoholism and hubris in antagonizing powerful foes in the Senate and Eisenhower administration. Although Wicker's take on McCarthy isn't groundbreaking, he combines insightful political history with a deft character study to craft a wonderful introduction to this crucial American figure. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

From February 1950 to December 1954, the nondescript, content-free Republican junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-57), galvanized the nation with charges that there were Communists in the State Department and, of all places, the army. The press seldom asked McCarthy for particulars, which seems incredible, but the context Wicker sketches is that of great trust in those who ran for elective office and great fear of communism, whose genuine minions Congressman Richard Nixon and others had already shockingly exposed. McCarthy never nailed a single commie, and he fatally overreached in attacking the army, whose courtroom-sharpie counsel, Joseph N. Welch, shot him down as millions watched during the first nationally televised government proceedings. Welch and the army were abetted, as Wicker shows, by important Republicans, including President Eisenhower, as well as by McCarthy's drinking (he died of alcohol-related conditions) and the repulsiveness of such henchmen as Roy Cohn. From henceforward, consider Wicker's efficient, modest, eminently readable brief everyone's first book on the man who gave us McCarthyism. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015101082X
• ISBN-13: 978-0151010820
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #633,381 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A very complicated character.", March 23, 2006

By 

Steven Hellerstedt "SH" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy (Hardcover)

Robert Kennedy's assessment of Joseph McCarthy, quoted a time or two in Tom Wicker's SHOOTING STAR, sums it up pretty well. Wicker explores some of that complexity in this brief survey of the `arc' period of McCarthy's senate career, a time span roughly covering his infamous Lincoln Day's speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950 to a senate vote of censure against him in the fall of 1954. Before the censure, though, McCarthy battled presidents, the bureaucracy, and the military in his tireless quest to ferret out the communist menace. Few in America have risen to such dizzying heights of power, influence and fame, fewer yet have suffered such a precipitous fall.

Truman is president and the Russians are testing the A-bomb. Spies are selling our atomic secrets to them and someone recently `lost' mainland China to the communists when McCarthy's star ignited and went super-nova after the Lincoln Day's speech. For a brief span he was powerful enough to attack presidents Republican and Democrat, attack the iconic General George Marshall, attack even the United States army. "With his command of drama and deception," Wicker writes, "his reckless intuition, and his thirst for distinction, he had shrewdly exploited the dark places of the American psyche."

There's a raft of books on McCarthy and McCarthyism, and if truth be told Wicker doesn't add anything new to the story. A decade or so ago Wicker wrote a book on another of Herblock's unshaven thugs - Richard Nixon. In the prologue to One of Us the Young Reporter spots a glowering, eye-averting Nixon slouching through a Washington government building. Wicker repeats the device in SHOOTING STAR when he recalls meeting an inebriated and disheveled, but outgoing and friendly, Joe McCarthy in a senate building in 1957, long after the senator's fall from grace. Journalists can make notoriously frustrating historians, especially those who write about events they covered, and Wicker was covering Washington within a few years of McCarthy's censure. The good ones, and Wicker is one of the best, excel at description but tend to falter at analysis. What he comes up with is a McCarthy who is something more than a demagogue, something less than a true believer.

SHOOTING STAR is a relatively short book, closer to a detailed essay than a full-blown history. In the prologue Wicker claims he became fascinated with McCarthy when writing a book on Eisenhower. The result of that fascination is a book that describes, in satisfying detail, the many battles of Joe McCarthy. Less satisfying is its explanation and analyses of those battles. Recommended especially for those who don't want to tackle a full-blown biography but are interested in a lively, well-written account of McCarthy's rise and fall.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brief but informative book, November 26, 2006

By 

JoeV "Reader" (Arlington Hts, IL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy (Hardcover)

As the title suggests, this brief, (I read this book during a flight delay at O'Hare), but interesting book chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of Joe McCarthy from 1950-54, (from his West Virginia speech to his censure), and his controversial impact on US history during that time. Although there is a brief biographical sketch of the subject, (juxtaposing McCarthy's incredible and at times admirable drive to succeed with his carelessness with facts, the truth and people), there isn't much analysis or historical perspective here. This isn't a knock of the book - just a description. (For a more detailed analysis of communism in the US - Reds by Ted Morgan; for a more in depth bio of McCarthy - Thomas Reeves). If you are looking for an introduction or a refresher to McCarthy and the "ism" that bears his name, this very readable book will not disappoint.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Short but Detailed Account of Joe McCarthy and His 15 Minutes of Hateful Fame, May 17, 2010

By 

Gregory E. Foster "operabruin" (Portland, ME, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy (Hardcover)

As a very small boy, I remember sitting on my father's lap before our old floor model radio and listening to the broadcast(s) of some of the "goings-on" during the McCarthy Hearings, and his anger and disappointment at what was going on in this country and our government at that time. My dad never swore or used profanity, but I remember still some of the words he used concerning these activities, and on Joe McCarthy himself.

Growing up I was not much into history or historical things, and only developed those interests in later years. These days I seem to not be able to get enough "back pages", which, of course, resulted, today into our "current pages"....We are who we are now because of who and what went on previously. Not to preach, but "America wake up and take a lesson from all this sort of crap and get yourselves straight today!"

Tim Wicker gives us absolutely fascinating background on McCarthy as he was growing up, and where he went wrong. It's breathtaking to think of what this flawed man could have achieved had he directed his efforts to good rather than evil ends. It floors me to look at a story like this and see how "Genius turns Evil" and what the results can become. The lives and people ruined because of the out and out fabrications and lies that this wicked little man used against them, and sadly, made it stick through repeated badgering and smoke and mirror type actions.

Wicker gives us the under-covered interactions that were going on in many "fronts" of both McCarthy's life and in the lives of Roy Cohn and his cronies, etc., and the strings pulled and threatened efforts, etc. that they were able to pull off.

It is also interesting to see just where John and Ted Kennedy, LBJ, Dirkson, Eisenhower, Nixon, Hoover, and others were in all this, and of course, the final un-doing with the efforts of ABC and Edward R. Murrow and others, and finally the "waking up of Congress" to stand up and speak out against this truly evil misguided man. In the end, of course, not one charge was ever proven against any of the victims of McCarthy's lies and accusations, but the damage was done already and many never recovered from all this.

There are certainly much longer (and I am sure much more detail) accounts of all this, but I found this relatively short, but very clearly written and information packed book just the thing to enlighten me about just what this sad chapter in our history was all about.

I highly recommend this, it is an easy afternoon and evening's read.