Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Attack on the State Department: The Temporary Triumph of Polemics

On the afternoon of February 9, 1950 in an address before the Republican Women's Club of Ohio County in Wheeling, West Virginia. Senator Joseph McCarthy began his career as a national figure by introducing his charges of State Department subversion. According to reporter Frank Desmond of the Wheeling Intelligencer, McCarthy included the following statement among his remarks. While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members ot the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department. The following day in Denver, McCarthy claimed to have been misquoted in the Intelligencer and to have stated only that two hundred five security risks, not Communist Party members, were then employed in the State Department