Senator McCarthy’s Crusade begins

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was thirty-eight when he entered the United States Senate in 1946 as a Republican from Wisconsin. The product of a Wisconsin dairy farm and the Jesuits at Marquette University in Milwaukee, he had made a career as a lawyer and judge before joining up in 1942 and serving in the Pacific. He had a satisfactory war record, though nothing like as glittering as he made it seem afterwards, when he pretended to have been a tail-gunner. Parading as a war-hero, he narrowly defeated the veteran Robert M. La Follette Jr. for the Republican nomination for senator and then swamped the Democrat in the election.