To call McCarthy a conspiracy theorist is giving him too much credit. He was more like a conspiracy-monger. He had one pitch, which he trotted out on all occasions. It was that American governmental and educational institutions had been infiltrated by a secret network of Communists and Communist sympathizers, and that these people were letting Stalin and Mao have their way in Europe and Asia, and were working to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship.
What distinguished McCarthy’s claims was their outlandishness. He didn’t attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy. In 1951, he claimed that George Marshall, the Secretary of Defense, the former Secretary of State, and the author of the Marshall Plan, had been, throughout his career, “always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin.” Marshall, he said, sat at the center of “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.”
Even Republicans were aghast. Marshall was almost universally regarded as a selfless public servant and a model of personal probity. The leader of the Party’s conservative wing, Robert Taft, expressed regret that McCarthy had overstated his case. But that was about as far as most Republicans had the nerve to go. Nothing came of McCarthy’s attack. For McCarthy, though, the important thing was that he had said something that was manifestly preposterous and had got away with it. He must have realized that he could get away with anything.
McCarthy lied all the time. He lied even when he didn’t need to lie, as Tye thinks is the case with the war record. When he didn’t have any facts to embellish, he made them up. He found that, if he just kept on repeating himself, people would figure that he must be onto something.
He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.