SENATOR Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who died in disgrace nearly 40 years ago after questioning the loyalty of decent Americans who had worked for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, is awaiting rehabilitation because he was right, his supporters say.
Meanwhile his victims, who had helped save their country from collapse in the Great Depression by formulating social programmes for the poor and the aged and by promoting industrial unionism to give the wage earner a chance in life, died in obscurity, their reputations in tatters.
Now that communism is no longer an issue in US politics, some journalists want to rehabilitate "tail gunner Joe", the nickname McCarthy adopted after one flight aboard a US combat plane, as a passenger, in the Pacific War.
The matter at rehabilitation was raised recently in the Washington Post by Nicholas von Hoffman, a fine journalist who appears to have made the passage from left to right politically.
McCarthy did not invent the Red Scare. He came to it late, as a conservative republican who needed an issue to build his political career. A Jesuit in Georgetown University wrote a speech for him which he delivered in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950, saying that he held in his hand a list of names - the figure changed almost daily, but it was always in the hundreds - of communists in the State Department who were traitors to the United States.
Suddenly the little known Senator from Wisconsin was page one news. Editors told their Washington correspondents to keep him covered and to find out who was on that list. They never did. There was no list of communists in the State Department but that speech made McCarthy a power in the land.
He grew reckless. He produced other names which he linked with communism. He called the soldier statesman, Gen George C. Marshall, the war time chief of staff, and later Secretary of Defence and Secretary of State, "a communist", while campaigning for Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did not defend his former chief.
But vaulting ambition, not the US press, brought down McCarthy. When a staff aide named David Schine - whose specialty was sniffing treason in books circulated abroad by the State Department was drafted into the army, McCarthy, or rather his chief aide, Roy Cohn, demanded his release. The army naturally refused.
McCarthy held televised congressional hearings that ran for weeks in an attempt to discover who had ignored the red hunting senator's simple request. He put the secretary of the army on the witness stand and ridiculed him. A lawyer for the army broke the spell by demanding of the senator: "Have you no shame, sir?" The answer was obvious clearly he had not. But his investigation collapsed and suddenly McCarthyism became a joke.
The Senate disowned him. He died a few years later of alcoholism. His aide Cohn made a lot of money as a lawyer, but was disbarred before he died of AIDS.
On this evidence the current effort to rehabilitate "tail gunner Joe", is unlikely to succeed for the simple reason that as a red spy catcher McCarthy was a wash out. In a city teeming with real spies of all nationalities, he failed to expose even one.
What McCarthy had was a certain charm that grew from his impish sense of humour, indicating that he didn't take himself or his crusade too seriously. Nevertheless, it was a very serious business while it lasted, and for a lot of people it was a tragedy.