This is a professional hatchet job with a tiny bit of objectivity thrown in, eg a comment or two from Ann Coulter. Today, the name Joseph McCarthy is synonymous with McCarthyism, meaning a witch-hunt, but was he wrong or entirely wrong about communist influences inside the State Department or American society in general?
The programme makers make the point that Richard Nixon rather than McCarthy was instrumental in the prosecution of Alger Hiss. Those who have studied the Hiss-Chambers case will realise how this perfidious ideology really worked inside the United States at that time. In the 1930s and 40s, American communism was not a mass movement, rather it was an elitist one. The Communist Party was totally subservient to Moscow, recruited largely people who were going places or at least in some sort of positions of responsibility, and acted in near if not total secrecy.
By the time McCarthy appeared on the scene, it was not a spent force, but had lost a lot of momentum; many communists had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Communism/Socialism took a new direction, in particular infiltrating the universities, and then there was and remains the asinine anti-racist movement, and even worse the lunacy of LGBT rights or whatever initials it has this week. The conspiracy McCarthy believed existed did not exist in the same way it had, it was morphing into networks of brainwashed and often braindead sheeple, something we have seen on the campuses of North America, including especially Canada, and in the UK. Its adherents were no longer purloining American Government documents to copy and send to Moscow, but were intent on undermining the fabric of American society. And to date, they have done an excellent job of it.
Something else of which he appears to have been blissfully unaware was the financing of the Soviet Union by Wall Street. The researches of Antony C. Sutton have given us a picture of the Soviet Union and East-West relations unlike any you will find in mainstream history books. For example, to quote from "National Suicide", published in 1973: "Soviet tractor plants before World War II were established in the early 1930s with major U.S. technical and equipment assistance." And there is a great deal more where that came from. This was not the work of "reds under the bed" purloining documents from US administrative offices but of people far higher up the food chain. Had McCarthy even suspected this, one imagines he would have revised his entire belief system, and his name would have been even more reviled today.
One other point, the people behind this programme conveniently forgot to mention the Venona transcripts, which were made available long before it was broadcast. These show that in essence, McCarthy was correct about the extent of the communist infiltration of the American Government, whatever damage these people did or did not do to the national interest.
