Ahead of the 1950 midterm elections, the GOP hoped to retake Congress with the slogan “Liberty Versus Socialism.” Many far more prominent Republicans than McCarthy spent that February weekend accusing Democrats of allowing communists to infiltrate the government. The prepared text of McCarthy’s speech drew on those same themes, including lines plagiarized from then-Congressman (and Senate candidate) Richard Nixon.
McCarthy’s office had hired two newspapermen from the Washington Times-Herald to assemble the speech text for him. In fact, when he arrived in Wheeling to headline a dinner honoring Abraham Lincoln’s birthday for a local Republican women’s club, McCarthy didn’t even know that he would give a speech on communism. McCarthy told his hosts that he could speak on either communism or housing policy, and they chose the former. Before revising the text himself, McCarthy gave a spare copy to a reporter who wrote an account of the speech in the Wheeling Intelligencer. Crucially, the reporter based his account on the speech text, not off of what McCarthy actually said.
This mattered because it was his article that ignited McCarthyism. In the eighth paragraph, the reporter repeated the claim from the speech text that McCarthy had “a list of 205” spies. McCarthy, however, later denied using that number, which was a distortion of something printed in the Congressional Record. Without the audio of his remarks, no one ever knew for sure if he made the claim or not.
Regardless, an Associated Press editor, who had not heard the speech, saw the Intelligencer report and issued an AP bulletin. Since most of McCarthy’s remarks followed standard Republican talking points, the AP bulletin zeroed in on the one part that seemed newsworthy. “Sen. McCarthy charged in an address here tonight that 205 Communist party members are ‘working and shaping the policy in the State Department,’” the bulletin began, giving this statement far more prominence than it had in the original text. The editor found the number questionable enough to check it with the Intelligencer, but he did not ask for corroborating evidence—such as proof that McCarthy’s list existed. After receiving confirmation that McCarthy had said “205,” the AP printed it—because, coming from a senator, the statement had news value, whether it was true or not.
The AP bulletin turned an unremarkable speech, given before a minor-league political group, into an alarming declaration about government—one that now demanded an official rebuttal. Relatively few newspapers published the initial AP dispatch. But when reporters caught up with McCarthy and told him the State Department had denied his claim, the senator’s insistence that he did have a list (but could not show it to them right now) made the story newsworthy once again.