Reply #66: This is a Sen. Joe McCarthy (McCarthyism) infamous tactic. [View All]

[Divernan]

He was the Senator who started the whole red baiting in Congress to get some publicity for his campaign, and ended up a broken man, died of alcoholism.

Anyhow, he got off a plane in Wheeling, West Virginia, and strode up to a bank of microphones and journalists, and waved a batch of papers in his hand, and say "I have in my hands a list of 205 State Department employees who are card carrying members of the Communist party." Thus started the witch hunt hearings which destroyed the careers and lives of many innocent people and created the black lists in Hollywood.

I researched the McCarthy era for a master's thesis. One of the things I learned was that those pages did not have anyone's names on them, and he pulled that 205 number out of his ass.