"Joseph McCarthy explains how this farm boy from Wisconsin sprang up from a newly confident postwar America, and how he embodied the hopes and anxieties of a generation caught in the toils of the Cold War. It shows how McCarthy used the explosive issue of Communist spying in the thirties and forties to challenge the Washington political establishment and catapult himself into the headlines.

Above all, it gives us a picture of the red scare far different from and more accurate than the one typically portrayed in the news media and the movies."--BOOK JACKET.