Joseph R. McCarthy Quotes

I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people that 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.

I didn't agree with what Joe McCarthy was trying to do, but I sure did admire his methods.

While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

Joe McCarthy and his Senate hearings were like witch-hunts.

I'm a Red-baiter; I'm a witch-hunter if the witches are Communists.

And at home in the United States we found continued and increased persecution, first of leaders of the Communist Party, and then of all honest anti-fascists.

Annie Lee Moss was a black woman who worked for the Army as a code clerk in the Pentagon. She was identified by an undercover agent of the FBI as a member of the Communist Party. Moss denied it, the Democrats sprang to her defense, and she has been treated ever since as an innocent victim of McCarthy.

McCarthyism

In the immortal words of Dean Acheson, I will not turn my back on Joe McCarthy.

Even if there were only one communist in the State Department, that would still be one communist too many.

In the McCarthy era, people were losing their jobs--there was this blanket feeling that no one should not say anything about anything, McCarthy and his people were just sitting around calling meetings, calling up people before them, and ruining their lives.

“[T]he manufactured image of the domestic Communist, cultivated and propagated by [J. Edgar] Hoover, the Catholic Church, the American Legion, and political opportunists, made of Communists something less than full humans, full citizens, fully rights-endowed …

I knew people who were real Communists but never made it onto the blacklist and kept on working. There were also people reputed to be Communists who weren't.

At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.

[On the House Un-American Activities Committee] They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem.

Is there anything more anti-American than McCarthyism?

McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.

First of all, let it be remembered that I speak as an ex-Communist and one who has not testified before Congressional Committees, nor written works on the Communist conspiracy.

My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father - dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes.

One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.

Can anything be more Un-American than the Un-American committee?

There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.

The Rosenberg case had been orchestrated to an anti-Communist frenzy that matched the exuberant hysteria of the Nazi horror.

I've said many a time that I think the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives was the most un-American thing in America!