Joe McCarthy: Then and Now | THE ZEITGEISTY REPORT
Like all demagogues, Joe McCarthy would eventually be done in by his own excesses. In 1954 when he tried to take on the United States Army, accusing them of being stacked to the rafters with Card Carrying Commies, the very absurdity of the charge proved to be too absurd even for the Congress. In a famous confrontation that was viewed by millions on television, council for the Army, Joseph Welsh, asked the thoroughly humiliated McCarthy:
“At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?”
By the end of the year, on December 2, he would be censored, stripped of all of his seniority. Two-and-a-half years later, he would be dead; a broken man victimized – as he himself victimized so many others – by his own demons, primarily alcoholism. He was forty-nine years old
In May of 1957 the body of Joseph McCarthy was laid to rest in a small, rural cemetery adjacent to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Appleton, Wisconsin. The practice of baseless, political accusations that haunted America through much of the 1950s and which bears his name – McCarthyism – was buried with him….or so we believed at the time