What if Joseph McCarthy had been a Soviet Agent?

What if in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell, records became uncovered that showed that Joseph McCarthy had been blackmailed by the Soviet Union to prosecute hundreds of people in an attempt to purge and weaken America.

If this had turned out to be true how would Joseph McCarthy and congressional witch hunts be seen today?

What if this information had leaked decades earlier in the 1950's. What butterflies would this have on the anti-communist movement?
 
What is your definition of an agent ?

It is quite frequent that the best "agents" are not agents. I am refering to those that Lenin dubbed as "useful idiots", the people who, although believing that they are fighting their country's rivals, do so much harm to their own country that they unwillingly serve the interest of rival/enemy countries.

From this point of view, Mac Carthy harmed his country better than the USSR could have hoped.
 
Read 'Stalin's secret agents: the subversion of Roosevelt's government' and 'Blacklisted by history' by M. Stanton Evans and realize how wrong you are. Mc Carthy was dead right on a great number of things. It wasn't him that harmed American interests.
 
Read 'Stalin's secret agents: the subversion of Roosevelt's government' and 'Blacklisted by history' by M. Stanton Evans and realize how wrong you are. Mc Carthy was dead right on a great number of things. It wasn't him that harmed American interests.

A bully with a fake combat record is not worth defending. He never found a Soviet spy but he did ruin a lot of peoples lives with the laundry receipt that he claimed was a list of Soviet agents in the State Dept.
 
Read 'Stalin's secret agents: the subversion of Roosevelt's government' and 'Blacklisted by history' by M. Stanton Evans and realize how wrong you are. Mc Carthy was dead right on a great number of things. It wasn't him that harmed American interests.

I never said there were no soviet spies. I said that Mac Carthy, although not a soviet psy, did more harm to the US than any soviet spy ever did.
 
In the original "The Manchurian Candidate" the McCarthy analog is at best a dupe for the Russian agent who is in charge of the project to undermine America. It is not entirely clear how much a true participant in the plot he is due to being a bit of a fool. I'll say no more so as not to spoil this movie for those who have not seen it - and if you haven't see this THE ORIGINAL do so as soon as you can.

McCarthyism and McCarthy basically caught no Soviet agents and did much more damage to the US than any of the "pinkos" whose careers and lives were destroyed. Many highly qualified and patriotic folks were ruined by this campaign, and resulting lack of balance in US foreign policy decision making led to some huge errors over the next 20 years - self inflicted wounds from having only one "voice" in decision maiing discussions.
 
Ted Morgan proposed an even more shocking theory in his story Joe McCarthy's Secret Life in the What Ifs? of American History anthology - that McCarthy, being in debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars due to gambling losses, willingly became a Soviet agent for money - that he betrayed his country for mercenary, not ideological reasons, and also to get re-elected.

If that was discovered to be true... well then, Harry Truman's statement that McCarthy was "the best asset the Kremlin has" would have been proven in spades!
 
Best way for him to work for the USSR would be to spearhead the investigation like he did IOTL, but go after the small fish and deliberately ignore the big ones. Then it looks like we cleaned up the problem and we have a false sense of security, while the most damaging traitors were still in place.
 
There wasn't a senator whose name i can't remember whow as part of the comitte who was working to the soviets for money?
 
There wasn't a senator whose name i can't remember whow as part of the comitte who was working to the soviets for money?

Sam Dickstein, though he was in the House, not Senate. Like McCarthy though he did investigate "Un-American Activities"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Dickstein_(congressman)

http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...n-russian-spy-111641_Page3.html#ixzz3FU8vICnT

https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/...for-a-soviet-spy-goes-largely-unnoticed/?_r=0

Amusingly enough he still has a street named after him.
 
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Read 'Stalin's secret agents: the subversion of Roosevelt's government' and 'Blacklisted by history' by M. Stanton Evans and realize how wrong you are. Mc Carthy was dead right on a great number of things. It wasn't him that harmed American interests.

A *very* anti-Communist historian on McCarthy:

"By the time McCarthy was making his allegations, however, the most significant Soviet espionage networks had been all but destroyed and/or neutralized thanks to defections, American counter-intelligence, the FBI’s full-court press against the CPUSA, and President Truman’s loyalty-security program for government employees. Still, McCarthy not only persisted, but sought to paint FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal as a disguised Communist plot, while depicting such prominent administration officials as Dean Acheson and George C. Marshall as participants in or dupes of a Communist conspiracy.

"To be sure, though it is often alleged that Wisconsin’s junior senator never uncovered a single Communist, McCarthy did identify a number of party members in the US government, including Annie Lee Moss, a civilian Army employee, who is discussed at some length in Evans’s book (and for good reason, as Moss is frequently cited as an example of McCarthy at his worst). But McCarthy did not establish his national standing by correctly identifying this low-level Army employee as a security risk. He made it, to quote McCarthy in a speech on George Marshall, by thundering in June 1951:

'How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . .'[3]

"Certainly, several US officials, including some very high ones in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, displayed great naïveté toward Soviet espionage, and internal security policies until the late 1940s were notably weak. But there is no evidence to justify McCarthy’s allegation of wholesale administration or Democratic complicity in this treachery. Officials (like Alger Hiss) who spied or attempted to influence US policy on behalf of the Soviet Union, also betrayed Roosevelt, Truman, their administrations, and their colleagues, in addition to violating the nation as a whole.

"Normal democratic politics cannot proceed when one side regards and depicts the other as the enemy of fundamental values, and somehow illegitimate. Yet that is what McCarthy attempted to do, via demagoguery and malign partisan zeal. That he did not succeed, or even come close, hardly mitigates the fact that his role was an irretrievably negative one. It is true, and Stan Evans makes the case, that McCarthy was not a satanic monster who terrorized the nation and seriously threatened its democratic values. But he was a hindrance, rather than an asset, to a rational anti-Communist consensus, and is not deserving of the vindication that Evans seeks to confer." http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2007/12/mccarthy-accord.html
 
Read 'Stalin's secret agents: the subversion of Roosevelt's government' and 'Blacklisted by history' by M. Stanton Evans and realize how wrong you are. Mc Carthy was dead right on a great number of things. It wasn't him that harmed American interests.

Sure. And the Soviet gouvernment was fulf of Trotzky's agents until Stalin purged the party. Also, 9/11 was an inside job and the moon landing faked by the US.
 
This may be helpful in analyzing how much (or how little) Tailgunner Joe did in identifying real authentic Commie spies.

It's a nice selection of how many he accused and what their connections to Soviet intelligence actually were.
 
What if in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell, records became uncovered that showed that Joseph McCarthy had been blackmailed by the Soviet Union to prosecute hundreds of people in an attempt to purge and weaken America.

If this had turned out to be true how would Joseph McCarthy and congressional witch hunts be seen today?

What if this information had leaked decades earlier in the 1950's. What butterflies would this have on the anti-communist movement?

No but maybe he wife was!
 
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