[9] In succeeding years after his 1950 speech, McCarthy made additional accusations of Communist infiltration into the State Department, the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voice of America, and the U.S. Army.

[30] In 1942, shortly after the U.S. entered World War II, McCarthy joined the United States Marine Corps, despite the fact that his judicial office exempted him from military service.

"[35] He served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron VMSB-235 in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville for 30 months (August 1942 – February 1945), and held the rank of captain at the time he resigned his commission in April 1945.

[38][39] He later falsely claimed participation in 32 aerial missions so as to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross and multiple awards of the Air Medal, which the Marine Corps decided to approve in 1952 under his political influence.

[44][43] A "war wound"—a badly broken leg—that McCarthy attributed to varying adventures involving airplane crashes or anti-aircraft fire, had in fact happened aboard ship during a raucous celebration for sailors crossing the equator for the first time.

[51] In 1952, using rumors collected by Pearson as well as other sources, Nevada publisher Hank Greenspun wrote that McCarthy was a frequent patron at the White Horse Inn, a Milwaukee gay bar, and cited his involvement with young men.

His advocacy in this area was associated by critics with a $20,000 personal loan McCarthy received from a Pepsi bottling executive, earning the Senator the derisive nickname "The Pepsi-Cola Kid".

It was later found that McCarthy had received "evidence" of the false torture claims from Rudolf Aschenauer, a prominent Neo-Nazi agitator who often served as a defense attorney for Nazi war criminals, such as Einsatzgruppen commander Otto Ohlendorf.

[67] McCarthy experienced a meteoric rise in national profile beginning on February 9, 1950, when he gave a Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.

[77] In reciting the information from the Lee list cases, McCarthy consistently exaggerated, representing the hearsay of witnesses as facts and converting phrases such as "inclined towards Communism" to "a Communist".

"[81] During the hearings, McCarthy made charges against nine specific people: Dorothy Kenyon, Esther Brunauer, Haldore Hanson, Gustavo Durán, Owen Lattimore, Harlow Shapley, Frederick Schuman, John S. Service, and Philip Jessup.

In a November 1953 speech that was carried on national television, McCarthy began by praising the Eisenhower Administration for removing "1,456 Truman holdovers who were ... gotten rid of because of Communist connections and activities or perversion."

His freewheeling style caused both the Senate and the Subcommittee to revise the rules governing future investigations, and prompted the courts to act to protect the Constitutional rights of witnesses at Congressional hearings. ...

Ed Kretzman, a policy advisor for the service, would later comment that it was VOA's "darkest hour when Senator McCarthy and his chief hatchet man, Roy Cohn, almost succeeded in muffling it.

The appointment became controversial when it was learned that Matthews had recently written an article titled "Reds and Our Churches",[121][122] which opened with the sentence, "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen."

Shortly thereafter it came to the attention of the military bureaucracy that Peress, who was a member of the left-wing American Labor Party, had declined to answer questions about his political affiliations on a loyalty-review form.

After hearing 32 witnesses and two million words of testimony, the committee concluded that McCarthy himself had not exercised any improper influence on Schine's behalf, but that Cohn had engaged in "unduly persistent or aggressive efforts".

On June 9, 1954,[136] the 30th day of the hearings, Welch challenged Roy Cohn to provide U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. with McCarthy's list of 130 Communists or subversives in defense plants "before the sun goes down".

The Murrow shows, together with the televised Army–McCarthy hearings of the same year, were the major causes of a nationwide popular opinion backlash against McCarthy,[142] in part because for the first time his statements were being publicly challenged by noteworthy figures.

To counter the negative publicity, McCarthy appeared on See It Now on April 6, 1954, and made a number of charges against the popular Murrow, including the accusation that he colluded with VOKS, the "Russian espionage and propaganda organization".

[citation needed] On March 18, 1954, Sauk-Prairie Star editor Leroy Gore of Sauk City, Wisconsin urged the recall of McCarthy in a front-page editorial that ran alongside a sample petition that readers could fill out and mail to the newspaper.

[144] Despite critics' claims that a recall attempt was foolhardy, the "Joe Must Go" movement caught fire and was backed by a diverse coalition including other Republican leaders, Democrats, businessmen, farmers and students.

[citation needed] Following the deadline of June 5, the final number of signatures was never determined because the petitions were sent out of state to avoid a subpoena from Sauk County district attorney Harlan Kelley, an ardent McCarthy supporter who was investigating the leaders of the recall campaign on the grounds that they had violated Wisconsin's Corrupt Practices Act.

[147][148] In a June 1 speech, Flanders compared McCarthy to Adolf Hitler, accusing him of spreading "division and confusion" and saying, "Were the Junior Senator from Wisconsin in the pay of the Communists he could not have done a better job for them.

[150] After two months of hearings and deliberations, the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on two of the 46 counts: his contempt of the Subcommittee on Rules and Administration, which had called him to testify in 1951 and 1952, and his abuse of General Zwicker in 1954.

The Republican primary was won by Governor Walter J. Kohler Jr., who called for a clean break from McCarthy's approach; he defeated former Representative Glenn Robert Davis, who charged that President Eisenhower was soft on Communism.

After a worried Rhode Island newspaper editor protested to the syndicate that provided the strip, creator Walt Kelly began depicting the Malarkey character with a bag over his head, concealing his features.

Also in 1954, the radio comedy team Bob and Ray parodied McCarthy with the character "Commissioner Carstairs" in their soap opera spoof "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife".

[184] The character of Senator John Iselin, a demagogic anti-communist, is closely modeled on McCarthy, even to the varying numbers of Communists he asserts are employed by the federal government.

[193] In Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, journalist M. Stanton Evans similarly argued that evidence from the Venona documents shows significant penetration by Soviet agents.