Buried Relic of Cold War Comes to Light (The Big Story With John Gibson, Fox News, 5 May 2003)
GIBSON: I think we've all come to know that McCarthy would have this list. He says, “I have a list here of 1,000 communists and they're in this department and that department, and so forth.” And it was all bogus, completely bogus, right?RITCHIE: Well, there were communists, and he did encounter communists from time to time. But what McCarthy was arguing was that he was after subversion and espionage. What he found were perhaps communists who were involved in labor organizing, maybe some security risks. He never found any cases of subversion and espionage.
GIBSON: By the way, this may not be a factor in the transcripts that we can now read, but is it true that McCarthy was drunk the whole time he was conducting these hearings?
RITCHIE: No, I don't think so. Not the whole time, at least. But he did drink heavily. And in the afternoon sessions, he tended to lose his temper a lot more frequently than in the morning sessions.
GIBSON: After lunch?
RITCHIE: Yes.
Transcripts show McCarthy's tactics: He picked targets behind closed door (Frederic J. Frommer, AP, 6 May 2003)
WASHINGTON - Sen. Joseph McCarthy used closed-door sessions to winnow out witnesses who might challenge him in the sensational anti-communism hearings of a half-century ago, transcripts unsealed yesterday show.Of the 500 witnesses who testified in private, one-third were never called back to testify in public.
"Anybody who stood up to McCarthy in closed session, and did so articulately, tended not to get called up into the public session," said Senate Associate Historian Donald Ritchie, who assembled the 4,000 pages of transcripts. "McCarthy was only interested in the people he could browbeat publicly."