“I have here in my hand a list of 250 [State Department employees] who were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department,” Joe McCarthy said in Wheeling, West Virginia in January, 1950. This setoff five years of public hysteria that paralyzed much of the national government, ruined careers, reputations, and hundreds of lives, frightened certified war heroes like Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy into at least public silence.

McCarthy created a world in which a mere allegation, unsupported by any whisper of evidence, could upend and destroy public lives.