Quotes About McCarthyism

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. —John Le Carré

I don't like wannabe authoritarians who lie in order to destroy people who disagree with them. In that regard, I despise Stalin, too. Are you a fan of McCarthy's? Or are you not political? So many people aren't in this town. They apparently don't have the guts.

I was living in a terrible time when people were being accused of being communists, and they attacked the movie industry, especially the writers. People couldn't work if they were on the blacklist. The studios banned them. It was the most onerous period in movie history. I don't think we have ever had a period so dark as that.

Declaration of Conscience," delivered on the Senate floor, derided McCarthy's "Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear." She and Kefauver were thus allies against

SENATOR JOSEPH MCCARTHY—ANGRY, JOWLY, AND PERPETUALLY indignant—had the instincts of a Mussolini, but without the intellectual foundation. Like Il Duce, he was a showman who loved politics and craved power. Unlike him, he began his public life largely ignorant of policy.

McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties

At the time, Sills said, "the main thing we experienced was the repression of any kind of deviant behavior under the guise of anti-Communism." None of them could understand why there weren't more people, especially artists, fighting it. "A pall of McCarthyism lay over the land," said Bernie Sahlins, a producer at Playwrights, "and all you heard on TV were mother-in-law jokes.

Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.

What was new to our ears these days, and thrilling to hear, was the steadiness and justice of those who spoke, the abscence of panic and exaggeration the quiet insistence on legal processes as opposed to trial by suspicion. McCarthyism so repelled the English that they take special care not to be infected by it.

On July 7, Essie was subpoenaed to appear before the feared McCarthy Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations. Headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, a right-wing Republican from Wisconsin, this so-called McCarthy Committee was spearheading the anticommunist witch hunt throughout the nation with its high-profile hearings.

After China's fall to the Communists in 1949, which McCarthy and his allies deemed a stab in the back by a treasonous State Department, the Far Eastern Affairs division had been gutted, its most gifted analysts farmed out to other bureaus or hounded out of government altogether.