I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, but, to a certain extent, McCarthy is a scapegoat. His excesses and his political vulgarity have made him a convenient symbol of Cold War anti-Communism—its ideological intolerance, its disregard for civil liberties, its exaggerated warnings about Communist infiltration and expansion. But McCarthy was responsible for none of those things. The work he is credited with doing—purging the government of spies and “security risks,” typically people suspected of Communist sympathies—had already been done before he got up to speak in Wheeling.
This is the main reason (along with his general disorderliness) that no one McCarthy investigated was ever convicted of anything. There were almost no Communists left to fire or spies left to convict. McCarthy can be blamed for continuing the official practice of witch-hunting long past the point it made any sense, but he cannot be blamed for creating it. The blame for that rests with a man who hated McCarthy, Harry Truman.
After the war ended, in 1945, it was not immediately clear what our future relations with the Soviet Union would be. But, by early 1947, many in the American government had concluded that the Soviet Union was a hostile power, and that Communist parties in Western Europe were threats to democracy there.
On March 12th, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, Truman relieved the situation of any remaining ambiguity. He announced that it was the policy of the United States “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” “Armed minorities” meant Communist insurgents, and “outside pressures” meant the Kremlin. The policy was quickly named the Truman Doctrine. That speech was the start of the Cold War.
Nine days later, Truman signed an executive order establishing the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which tasked the F.B.I. and other agencies with undertaking investigations of government employees suspected of disloyalty—specifically, anyone with “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group, or combination of persons, designated by the Attorney General as totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.” According to the Columbia scholar Ira Katznelson, between 1947 and 1953, 4,765,705 federal employees had to fill out forms initiating loyalty investigations. Of these employees, 26,236 were referred for further scrutiny, and five hundred and sixty were fired or not hired. Homosexuals were targeted as security risks (being vulnerable to blackmail) or as generally undesirable. There were no anti-discrimination laws to protect them. They were simply fired.