Joseph R. Quotes

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

[Joseph R.] McCarthy was a fascist of the worst type. The only thing American about him was that he was born in Wisconsin.

I just will not—I refuse—to get into the gutter with that guy.

Resolved, that the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, is unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate, is contrary to senatorial traditions, and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute, and such conduct is hereby condemned.

Joe McCarthy was the local town drunk in a business suit.

Nobody from the CIA is going to account for their loyalty to [Senator Joseph] McCarthy.

If Senator McCarthy believed those things when he said them about the Senate Committee then there is pretty solid ground to say that he ought to be expelled from the Senate for moral incapacity. If he put those things in there honestly believing them to be true, then he has evidently suffered gigantic mental delusions, and it may be argued with much force, that he should be expelled from the Senate for mental difficulty.

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

The most unlovely political character in our history since Aaron Burr.

The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body in the world. But recently that deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.

They have the Republican Party of President Eisenhower. They have the Republican Party of Senator Taft. They have the Republican Party of Senator Morse. And somewhere—way out behind the Chicago Tribune tower is—the Republican Party of Senator McCarthy with one foot heavy in Greece and the other foot in Secretary Dulles' security files. It makes bipartisanship right difficult. We Democrats need to know which one of the Republican Parties to be bipartisan with; and which one of the Republican Parties to be bipartisan against.

I think McCarthy was a menace... because he corrupted the ethics of American conservatives, and that corruption leads to the situation we have now. It gave the conservatives the habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical right... and appeasing them knowingly, expediently. I think that was the original sin of the conservative movement, and we [conservatives] are all suffering from it.

I just don't want their support. McCarthy said he apologized to the American people for supporting me; that is just the way I want it and I wish he would say it again.

I was brought up in a home where the Secretary of State was not the subject of partisan debate.

He dons his warpaint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his warwhoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist. We may assume that this represents the depth and seriousness of the Communist penetration in this country at this time.

The U. S. put the Japanese in camps during World War II; it had McCarthyism and now they have [George W.] Bush. But it will all pass. Democracy corrects itself.

It is necessary to investigate before legislating. But the line between investigation and persecution is a fine one.

If you are a man, you have to be like Joe McCarthy to be called “ruthless”. For a woman, all you have to do is put somebody on hold.

The junior Senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatred of uninformed and credulous people that he has started a prairie fire, which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.

I hate to see the entire issue decided on as narrow a base, but ... the size of the vote is more important than the arguments that are made.

It does not behoove the dignity of this Senate to smear any individual.

McCarthyism

He's a troublemaker, that why I don't want him.

… all of us … have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions … will lead him and us into trouble … it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will discredit the whole anti-Communist effort.

... the Kremlin ought to put McCarthy on its payroll.