McCarthy Was Right

The fact that Joe McCarthy liked to choose his own targets has never been a mistery. At least since the marines in Guadalcanal base decided to call him “Tail Gunner Joe”, beause he liked to fire from the back machine guns of Helldivers bombers during his patrol missions in South Pacific. The accuracy of his aim, however, would have been unknown for many decades, until the partial disclosure of KGB in Moscow and the declassification of the Venona Project that were to render justice to his anticommunist battle. The only ones to know the truth, up to that moment, were just his enemies.

On Ideazione.com, in addition to recent op-eds by Giuliano Ferrara and Paolo Guzzanti on the same subject, the four (long) articles on McCarthy’s life written by myself in January-February of this year for Il Foglio. "The true McCarthy’s story" (not the one told by George Clooney, just to be clear) is divided into four chapters: 1) The Senator that came from nowhere; 2) McCarthy’s first move; 3) Tail-Gunner Joe goes to war; 4) The sunset of the red-hunter.