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Very good in Good jacket. xi, [1], 626, [2] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Price clipped. Red 'H" at bottom of fep. DJ has some wear, soiling, edge tears and chips. Fred James Cook (March 8, 1911-April 4, 2003) was an American investigative journalist whose prime years of reporting spanned from the 1950s to the late 1970s. Fred J. Cook was a longtime staff writer for the New York World Telegram and Sun. Called by Studs Terkel "the finest investigative reporter in the land, His 1964 exposé, The FBI Nobody Knows, was central to the plot of one of Rex Stout's most popular novels, The Doorbell Rang. While editor of the New Jersey Courier in Lakewood, New Jersey, he covered the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. Having witnessed the airship flying overhead at Toms River, New Jersey, he first wrote about its anticipated arrival at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, then had to quickly rewrite the story after getting to the crash site while the ship was still in flames. Derived from a Kirkus review: The scarifying, stultifying late forties-early fifties Age of McCarthy is reconstructed as background for this political biography of the Senator. Cook tells McCarthy's career from his early days in Wisconsin politics to his downfall. The expose is literate, sure and rich, reminiscent of Cook's FBI, Hiss and Warfare State books. Cook firmly states that McCarthy was a vicious hysteric financed by wealthy and reputable Americans including Joe Kennedy and assorted oil moguls; at the same time, he implies that if someone was in fact a Communist or leftwing socialist he might indeed have been guilty of something. The biography is well-synthesized. Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908-May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread communist subversion. He alleged that numerous communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry, and elsewhere. Ultimately, he was censured by the Senate in 1954 for refusing to cooperate with, and abusing members of, the committee established to investigate whether or not he should be censured. The term "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents. Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, McCarthy commissioned into the Marine Corps in 1942, where he served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron. Following the end of World War II, he attained the rank of major. He volunteered to fly twelve combat missions as a gunner-observer. These missions were generally safe, and after one where he was allowed to shoot as much ammunition as he wanted to, mainly at coconut trees, he acquired the nickname "Tail-Gunner Joe". A Democrat until 1944, McCarthy successfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 1946 as a Republican, narrowly defeating incumbent Robert M. La Follette Jr. in the Wisconsin Republican primary, then Democratic challenger Howard McMurray by a 61%-37% margin. After three largely undistinguished years in the Senate, McCarthy rose suddenly to national fame in February 1950, when he asserted in a speech that he had a list of "members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" who were employed in the State Department. In succeeding years after his 1950 speech, McCarthy made additional accusations of Communist infiltration into the State Department, the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voice of America, and the U.S. Army. He also used various charges of communism, communist sympathies, disloyalty, or sex...
