Joseph Raymond McCarthy was an American Republican senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957. During his ten years in the Senate, McCarthy and his team became famous for their research on people in the United States government and others suspected of being Soviet agents or sympathizers of communism infiltrated in the public administration or the army.
Senator McCarthy did not calculate his strength when he tried to investigate the armed forces in 1953. That same year, as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy continued his denunciations of communist activity and influence -which came to affect the President Eisenhower- and in April 1954 he accused the Defense Secretary of covering up foreign espionage activities. Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to act against him. The awareness that this "witch hunt" endangered the essence of democracy also led the leaders of his own party to allow a motion of censure against him to flourish in 1954.
That same year, McCarthy lost the little prestige that was left to him when being transmitted in television the hearing of the senate against officers of the army by his presumed communist activity. His demagogic and brutal style was exposed.
He continued for another two years in his duties as senator, but his colleagues avoided him, and what happened weighed heavily on his mind and health. His biographers point out that, after the reprobation, he was never the same; Hospitalized at the Naval Hospital of Bethesda due to chronic alcoholism, he died at the age of 48, suffering from cirrhosis and hepatitis.
