McCarthyism in Retrospect.

This article analyzes the principle factor in the decline of the late Joseph McCarthy and thus a large factor in the decline of McCarthyism. As per the author, it was due to the man's lack of a sense of mission. Had he believed with any passion either in what he was saying or in the country's need for his services he would not have allowed the defeats he sustained in 1954 in the Army-McCarthy hearings and in the censure proceedings in the Senate to have driven him to the despair and alcoholism that characterized his later days. McCarthy showed that there could be a national demagogue, and it seems to me clear that, had he been a somewhat different sort, his daily prodigies need not have ended in 1954.