It isn't proof that he's guilty, but you'd think twice before declaring him innocent.
I don't think I need to say anything more at this point.
I see, so that only works in your Matlock analogy, and not in real life? Why did you make it then? Or is it that you disagree with the principle that someone is legally innocent before being proved guilty?
I'll take your refusal to answer the rest as a concession.
You can always refuse to answer questions about your own involvement or lack thereof in a crime, for any reason, whether you did it or not, any time under oath, or even merely when talking to the government in other circumstances, like filling out forms.
There are exceptions to this, but they're not relevant here.
That's why police officers say 'You have the right to remain silent'. Not 'You have the right to not say incriminating things specifically about a certain crime', you have the right not to speak at all.
Answering questions from the police when you're charged with a crime is different to answering questions from congress.
Now, you're thinking that
Don't be silly, you don't know what other people are thinking.
They can refuse to answer questions designed to incriminate themselves, even if the answers would not, in fact, do so.
That's nice. But that's not what the witness I quoted said he was doing. You can argue that he misspoke, but this really isn't an important point.
Seriously, haven't you ever watched Matlock, or any of those legal mysteries where a witness on the stand turns out to be the guilty party, and when they realize the game is up, they stop answering questions
Yeah, but do you then sit there and think "well, he must be innocent?" That's the point I was making. It isn't proof that he's guilty, but you'd think twice before declaring him innocent.
and aren't arrested for contempt?
Well, duh. The people who went to jail for contempt for not answering McCarthy's questions were the ones who refused to answer questions for which they couldn't plead the fifth. Like I said, congressional testimony and a criminal trial are different, and this is one of the reasons why.
Your hypothetical advice for people to just "refuse to answer questions" would land them in jail, just like I said, because inevitably some of the questions would not be ones for which they could plead the fifth.
As I've already pointed out that one of the few things that ever came of the hearings was someone getting charged with perjury, I think it's pretty obvious that refusing to answer questions was a good idea.
Let's stipulate that it was a good idea for them to plead the fifth when they did.
But were any of them spies, communists or security risks? Did McCarthy expose instances of lax security in the government or not? Did he have good reason to look? These are the important questions, and the answer to all of them is "yes."
My original point was that the common myth that none of the people McCarthy questioned were communists/security risks/soviet spies is bogus (and largely misses the point of the hearings). Quoting people taking the fifth under questioning was a comical way to demonstrate how silly the idea is. I could take the time to go through lists of witnesses and the evidence against them instead, but that takes longer and isn't as amusing.
You're confusing being the defendant in a criminal trial with being asked to testify before congress.
Read this quote again:
The CHAIRMAN. Were you an espionage agent when you were handling secret material over at the Army Signal Corps? Mr. ULLMANN. I must decline to answer on the grounds that a truthful answer may tend to incriminate me, sir.
He didn't say "I don't want to answer" or "I don't have to answer." He said "a truthful answer may tend to incriminate me."
This is a different matter to refusing to testify in a criminal trial in which you're the accused.
Sorry, he was just accused of being a liar and commmiting perjury, by Congressman Bennett. McCarthy then sued over it, but eventually dropped the case when it looked like he wasn't going to win, because he actually had said those things.
I'd like some evidence that he dropped this case "because he actually said those things." The congressional investigation said he didn't. What's your opinion based on? Or is this all referring to a different speech of McCarthy's?
What are you talking about? The only crime that Lattimore was ever accused of was lying to Congress.
Have a think about what happens if you refuse to answer questions from congress.
However, having a list of 205 people and claiming they are 'risks' and having one person on that list apparently being such a risk is not really evidence that the thing was worth it.
I see. Well tell me this:
a) How many people do you think were such a risk?
b) How many people need to be a risk before it was worth bothering to investigate?
no matter how you want to think otherwise, refusing to answer questions under oath because they might incriminate you is not solely restricted to the guilty,
Uh, what? Of course it is. Your answers can't incriminate you if you're not guilty of anything, so by definition it's restricted to the guilty.
it's also true of people who are pissed off and people who are worried you're trying to trap them in perjury, both of which would describe this bunch.
Do you really think these were innocent people who lied and made themselves look like spies, just to spite McCarthy? "How dare McCarthy accuse me of being a spy! I know, I'll pretend I *really am* a spy, that'll teach him!"
I suppose I could research one of the cases, round up the evidence, and list it here. But you'd probably do what you did with Lattimore, and say "well ok, that guy was a communist and should have been fired. But the rest of them weren't!" So I'm not going to bother.
Not known security risks, not known communists, but possible security risks, which other people had already looked at and decided were okay.
Originally, they were listed as being security risks. McCarthy wanted to know what happened about them -- whether the original assessment didn't hold up, or whether they should be fired. Given the high-profile spy cases in the State Department, where warnings from the FBI about security risks were ignored, it was a prudent question to ask.
Yes, he occasionally claimed he had a list of 205 communists, despite that fact that some of them had been put on the list by the FBI for, for example, drinking problems or blackmailable reasons. He was actually tried for prejury because of that, later on.
Is this about the speech in Wheeling? The congressional committee that investigated him found that McCarthy was probably telling the truth, that he had said he had the names of 57 communists, not 205. But whatever, maybe he exaggerated. Boo hoo. That's better than letting soviet spies keep their jobs in the state department.
I can't think of a time when McCarthy was tried for perjury. Do you have a reference for that?
He immediately started talking about how communists were shaping policy at the State Department, which was a completely absurd charge, and it went downhill from there.
That they were "shaping policy" might be debatable, although there was plenty of evidence for people who wanted to argue that line. But there were certainly communist spies and security risks who were working in the State Department and shouldn't have been. His charges were not "completely absurd."
As for not naming names, you can either think that was because he didn't want to screw up people's lives, except, of course, he did eventually name names. Or you can think he just wanted to make it harder to disprove his list at that time.
Only the first interpretation fits the facts. The Democrats already had the names, and Senator McCarthy even *offered to give them* the names in closed session. Not giving them the names during that speech, in open session, did nothing significant to "make it harder to disprove his list." He just didn't want the list given in public since some of them could turn out to be in the clear, just as he said.
Here, have a quote from McCarthy, just to nail it down:
"The Senator from Illinois demanded, loudly, that I furnish all the names. I told him at that time that so far as I was concerned, I thought that would be improper, that I did not have all the information about these individuals. I have enough to convince me that either they are members of the Communist Party or they have given great aid to the Communists; I may be wrong. That is why I said that unless the Senate demanded that I do so, I would not submit this publicly, but I would submit it to any committee, and would let the committee go over these in executive session. It is possible that some of these persons will get a clean bill of health."
Owen Lattimore, OTOH, is a prime example of why you never answer questions under oath,
Oh yes, brilliant legal strategy. Don't answer any questions. Have a nice time in jail, Owen.
(However, he certainly was a security risk, on of the few actual ones.)
So the Tydings committee was wrong to claim he wasn't a security risk?
How many more cases did they get wrong, in your opinion?
Whereas the actual fact that he didn't catch anyone would seem to tip the scales towards the common wisdom that, you know, he didn't catch anyone.
Ok then, here are some quotes from the senate transcripts. I got them just by randomly searching for "espionage" and "fifth amendment."
Here's McCarthy questioning someone:
The CHAIRMAN. Have you been in contact with any one at the Signal Corps Laboratories or Telecommunications within the past six weeks? Mr. FINESTONE. I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment. The CHAIRMAN. Have you been engaging in espionage? Mr. FINESTONE. Sir? The CHAIRMAN. Have you been engaging in espionage? Mr. FINESTONE. I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment. The CHAIRMAN. Are you an espionage agent as of today? Mr. FINESTONE. I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment. The CHAIRMAN. Are you in the pay of the Communist conspiracy as of today? Mr. FINESTONE. I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment.
Wow. This guy's clearly innocent. Here's another one:
The CHAIRMAN. Were you an espionage agent when you were handling secret material over at the Army Signal Corps? Mr. ULLMANN. I must decline to answer on the grounds that a truthful answer may tend to incriminate me, sir. The CHAIRMAN. Did you ever pass secret material to members of the Communist party when you were working at the Signal Corps? Mr. ULLMANN. I must decline to answer, sir, on the grounds stated.
Ooh, this one's cleverly avoided being "caught" too.
So, I guess if you want to weasel out of this, you'd say that McCarthy didn't "catch" these people because they denied the charges against them despite the evidence, or pleaded the fifth amendment. Or that someone else originally uncovered the evidence that these individuals were communists or spies, so maybe McCarthy wasn't the one who "caught" them. (Maybe for some of the witnesses it was McCarthy who first found them, but I'm not going to trawl through documents to find one.)
But this would be missing McCarthy's major point. McCarthy's primary goal was not to personally chase down individual communists and uncover their activities or have them fired from sensitive positions. (Although he did succeed in doing that.) That's the FBI's job, and other security services' job. McCarthy wanted to know why they didn't always seem to be doing that job. The famous Army-McCarthy hearings came about because McCarthy wanted to question army officials about this kind of thing, and they refused to answer him.
There are 81 people on his list who were cleared by the Senate's Tydings Committee, who were then hounded out of their job by an internal witchhunt in the State Department that was a direct result of McCarthy's actions. 81.
Ok, but to show that these were all innocent people, you have to show that the Tydings Committee was right and State Department security was wrong.
And, apparently, no other member of Congress could see this
Not every other member of Congress, just the Tydings Committee. And the committee didn't try very hard.
I don't know where you got your history lesson from.
My usual procedure is to read both sides of an argument, then check the evidence to see who's right.
He did have a list of 205 apparent security risks. (Not all communists, as he claimed occasionally. Only about half were even possibly communists.)
Did he really claim they were all communists? In his speeches, he said that the 205 were security risks, and that he had the names of 57 who were members of or who supported the communist party.
McCarthy's political opponents claimed that he was making up the lists, and as evidence pointed to the two different numbers 57 and 205, when these clearly referred to different things.
However, none of the people that had been identified as possible communists by him were identified as security risks by the Tydings Committe.
The Tydings Committee was partisan and bogus. I don't have transcripts to hand, but you'll find it was a bit of a whitewash. The Tydings Committee failed to investigate these charges properly, as they were supposed to do.
Notable cases where the charges were correct were Owen Lattimore, Philip Jessup, and John Stewart Service.
After they were cleared, the State Department started an internal witchhunt called the State Department's Loyalty Security Board and hounded many of them out of a job or dismissed them for made up reasons.
So, the State Department Loyalty Security Board worked on it for months and said some of them were security risks, and out they went. The Tydings Committee said all of them were not security risks. Who's more likely to be right? Do you really think that of the dozens of cases in the list, none of them were communists or security risks? Not even one? Doesn't that seem fishy to you? You'd think that, even by chance, there'd be one or two.
The original list of 205 wasn't produced by McCarthy sitting at home one day pulling out names from the State Department staff directory at random. It came from an FBI report that had been given earlier to the State Department. The FBI didn't choose names randomly either. Think about what the "I" stands for.
McCarthy wanted to know why more had not been done to investigate the charges in the report.
McCarthy definitely did not want to smear all of these people. When he made a speech in the senate listing the evidence against them, he refused to give the names of each of them, in case some of them turned out to be innocent. His opponents continuously interrupted him and asked for the names, but he refused to give them out in open session, to avoid the possibility of putting a black mark against an innocent man's name.
So much for McCarthy's witch hunt.
Every person was cleared by Congress, every one of them, as non-security risks.
They might have been "cleared" by a blanket statement by the Tydings Committee that McCarthy's list was rubbish, but many of them were later found to be security risks by other congressional committees, and by the State Department.
This is more an indictment of the Tydings committee than anyone else.
When it is the Constitutional right against self incrimination illegitimate?
Sometimes witnesses would plead the fifth when refusing to answer a question that wouldn't incriminate themselves. (For example, they were trying to protect others.)
Either way, when witnesses were pleading the fifth, something was definitely up. This goes against the common wisdom that McCarthy "didn't catch anyone."
But the newly (2003) released transcripts of McCarthy's hearings paint him as more of a professional asshole than a lunatic:
Actually, go and read them. Not articles about them, the actual transcripts. You'll be surprised at how little the common perception of McCarthy's investigations match reality. Be one of those people who knows the facts, not what's in the movies.
You'll mostly see him patiently questioning witnesses, many of whom plead the fifth amendment (sometimes legitimately, sometimes not.) He sounds just like a trial lawyer questioning a defendant. He's not an "asshole" any more than prosecuting attorneys are assholes. It's just that he's investigating security risks in the government, not conducting a criminal trial.
And after all those lives he destroyed in his pursuit of Communists,
List some lives he destroyed. Go on, try to find some names. This is another one of those urban legends about McCarthy. You won't find much.
how many did he catch? Zippo.
Well, in what sense was he supposed to "catch" them? He wasn't the FBI or the police. It wasn't his job to deal out indictments. In many cases, he drew attention to security risks who should be fired, and they were. Many people he questioned were clearly spies, communists, or covering for others who were. Often he was questioning members of the government about why security risks in the areas of their responsibility were not being removed or investigated.
McCarthy didn't know them. He ran around yelling about how he had a list, and it was entirely bogus.
He did have a list of security risks in the government. He made a famous speech in the Senate listing the cases and the evidence against them. I don't know in what sense you think that's "bogus."
In fact, that probably hindered the whole commie-tracking in the government, which needed doing.
This is a common hypothesis thrown out by McCarthy's political enemies, but it doesn't fit the facts. The FBI regularly made reports of security risks in the government (with evidence), especially in the State Department and the military, which were ignored. After McCarthy started his investigations and questioned people as to why this sort of thing was ignored, security was tightened and more people who were security risks were thrown out.
Slashdot Mirror
You're the person who has issue with it, and apparently thinks people have to be
Stop talking nonsense. You're just trolling now because you lost the argument.
Assuming someone is guilty or assuming someone is innocent, without considering the evidence, is stupid. Stop defending stupidity.
Nobody here disagrees with the principle of people being legally innocent before being proved guilty.
the nerdy boys who usually can't stand a girl to be smarter then them
Huh? I always found that the nerdy boys prefer smart girls.
It isn't proof that he's guilty, but you'd think twice before declaring him innocent.
I don't think I need to say anything more at this point.
I see, so that only works in your Matlock analogy, and not in real life? Why did you make it then? Or is it that you disagree with the principle that someone is legally innocent before being proved guilty?
I'll take your refusal to answer the rest as a concession.
No, it's not.
Yes, it is, as I explain below.
You can always refuse to answer questions about your own involvement or lack thereof in a crime, for any reason, whether you did it or not, any time under oath, or even merely when talking to the government in other circumstances, like filling out forms.
There are exceptions to this, but they're not relevant here.
That's why police officers say 'You have the right to remain silent'. Not 'You have the right to not say incriminating things specifically about a certain crime', you have the right not to speak at all.
Answering questions from the police when you're charged with a crime is different to answering questions from congress.
Now, you're thinking that
Don't be silly, you don't know what other people are thinking.
They can refuse to answer questions designed to incriminate themselves, even if the answers would not, in fact, do so.
That's nice. But that's not what the witness I quoted said he was doing. You can argue that he misspoke, but this really isn't an important point.
Seriously, haven't you ever watched Matlock, or any of those legal mysteries where a witness on the stand turns out to be the guilty party, and when they realize the game is up, they stop answering questions
Yeah, but do you then sit there and think "well, he must be innocent?" That's the point I was making. It isn't proof that he's guilty, but you'd think twice before declaring him innocent.
and aren't arrested for contempt?
Well, duh. The people who went to jail for contempt for not answering McCarthy's questions were the ones who refused to answer questions for which they couldn't plead the fifth. Like I said, congressional testimony and a criminal trial are different, and this is one of the reasons why.
Your hypothetical advice for people to just "refuse to answer questions" would land them in jail, just like I said, because inevitably some of the questions would not be ones for which they could plead the fifth.
As I've already pointed out that one of the few things that ever came of the hearings was someone getting charged with perjury, I think it's pretty obvious that refusing to answer questions was a good idea.
Let's stipulate that it was a good idea for them to plead the fifth when they did.
But were any of them spies, communists or security risks? Did McCarthy expose instances of lax security in the government or not? Did he have good reason to look? These are the important questions, and the answer to all of them is "yes."
My original point was that the common myth that none of the people McCarthy questioned were communists/security risks/soviet spies is bogus (and largely misses the point of the hearings). Quoting people taking the fifth under questioning was a comical way to demonstrate how silly the idea is. I could take the time to go through lists of witnesses and the evidence against them instead, but that takes longer and isn't as amusing.
Read this quote again:
He didn't say "I don't want to answer" or "I don't have to answer." He said "a truthful answer may tend to incriminate me."
This is a different matter to refusing to testify in a criminal trial in which you're the accused.
Sorry, he was just accused of being a liar and commmiting perjury, by Congressman Bennett. McCarthy then sued over it, but eventually dropped the case when it looked like he wasn't going to win, because he actually had said those things. I'd like some evidence that he dropped this case "because he actually said those things." The congressional investigation said he didn't. What's your opinion based on? Or is this all referring to a different speech of McCarthy's? What are you talking about? The only crime that Lattimore was ever accused of was lying to Congress. Have a think about what happens if you refuse to answer questions from congress. However, having a list of 205 people and claiming they are 'risks' and having one person on that list apparently being such a risk is not really evidence that the thing was worth it. I see. Well tell me this: a) How many people do you think were such a risk? b) How many people need to be a risk before it was worth bothering to investigate?
no matter how you want to think otherwise, refusing to answer questions under oath because they might incriminate you is not solely restricted to the guilty,
Uh, what? Of course it is. Your answers can't incriminate you if you're not guilty of anything, so by definition it's restricted to the guilty.
it's also true of people who are pissed off and people who are worried you're trying to trap them in perjury, both of which would describe this bunch.
Do you really think these were innocent people who lied and made themselves look like spies, just to spite McCarthy? "How dare McCarthy accuse me of being a spy! I know, I'll pretend I *really am* a spy, that'll teach him!"
I suppose I could research one of the cases, round up the evidence, and list it here. But you'd probably do what you did with Lattimore, and say "well ok, that guy was a communist and should have been fired. But the rest of them weren't!" So I'm not going to bother.
Not known security risks, not known communists, but possible security risks, which other people had already looked at and decided were okay.
Originally, they were listed as being security risks. McCarthy wanted to know what happened about them -- whether the original assessment didn't hold up, or whether they should be fired. Given the high-profile spy cases in the State Department, where warnings from the FBI about security risks were ignored, it was a prudent question to ask.
No, I don't have to show that, because only a few of those people were actually 'dismissed' for being security risks.
Ok, how many is "a few"? I'd be interested to know how many cases you admit the Tydings committee got wrong.
(And I don't know where you go 'innocent' from. None of them were found guilty of anything.)
I mean "innocent" simply in the sense of the accusations not being true, not innocent of some formal criminal charge.
The rest were, like I said, hounded out of their job by internal investigations that didn't go anywhere.
I'd like some documentation on that.
Is this about the speech in Wheeling? The congressional committee that investigated him found that McCarthy was probably telling the truth, that he had said he had the names of 57 communists, not 205. But whatever, maybe he exaggerated. Boo hoo. That's better than letting soviet spies keep their jobs in the state department.
I can't think of a time when McCarthy was tried for perjury. Do you have a reference for that?
He immediately started talking about how communists were shaping policy at the State Department, which was a completely absurd charge, and it went downhill from there.
That they were "shaping policy" might be debatable, although there was plenty of evidence for people who wanted to argue that line. But there were certainly communist spies and security risks who were working in the State Department and shouldn't have been. His charges were not "completely absurd."
As for not naming names, you can either think that was because he didn't want to screw up people's lives, except, of course, he did eventually name names. Or you can think he just wanted to make it harder to disprove his list at that time.
Only the first interpretation fits the facts. The Democrats already had the names, and Senator McCarthy even *offered to give them* the names in closed session. Not giving them the names during that speech, in open session, did nothing significant to "make it harder to disprove his list." He just didn't want the list given in public since some of them could turn out to be in the clear, just as he said.
Here, have a quote from McCarthy, just to nail it down:
Owen Lattimore, OTOH, is a prime example of why you never answer questions under oath,
Oh yes, brilliant legal strategy. Don't answer any questions. Have a nice time in jail, Owen.
(However, he certainly was a security risk, on of the few actual ones.)
So the Tydings committee was wrong to claim he wasn't a security risk?
How many more cases did they get wrong, in your opinion?
Ok then, here are some quotes from the senate transcripts. I got them just by randomly searching for "espionage" and "fifth amendment."
Here's McCarthy questioning someone:
Wow. This guy's clearly innocent. Here's another one:
Ooh, this one's cleverly avoided being "caught" too.
So, I guess if you want to weasel out of this, you'd say that McCarthy didn't "catch" these people because they denied the charges against them despite the evidence, or pleaded the fifth amendment. Or that someone else originally uncovered the evidence that these individuals were communists or spies, so maybe McCarthy wasn't the one who "caught" them. (Maybe for some of the witnesses it was McCarthy who first found them, but I'm not going to trawl through documents to find one.)
But this would be missing McCarthy's major point. McCarthy's primary goal was not to personally chase down individual communists and uncover their activities or have them fired from sensitive positions. (Although he did succeed in doing that.) That's the FBI's job, and other security services' job. McCarthy wanted to know why they didn't always seem to be doing that job. The famous Army-McCarthy hearings came about because McCarthy wanted to question army officials about this kind of thing, and they refused to answer him.
There are 81 people on his list who were cleared by the Senate's Tydings Committee, who were then hounded out of their job by an internal witchhunt in the State Department that was a direct result of McCarthy's actions. 81.
Ok, but to show that these were all innocent people, you have to show that the Tydings Committee was right and State Department security was wrong.
And, apparently, no other member of Congress could see this
Not every other member of Congress, just the Tydings Committee. And the committee didn't try very hard.
I don't know where you got your history lesson from.
My usual procedure is to read both sides of an argument, then check the evidence to see who's right.
He did have a list of 205 apparent security risks. (Not all communists, as he claimed occasionally. Only about half were even possibly communists.)
Did he really claim they were all communists? In his speeches, he said that the 205 were security risks, and that he had the names of 57 who were members of or who supported the communist party.
McCarthy's political opponents claimed that he was making up the lists, and as evidence pointed to the two different numbers 57 and 205, when these clearly referred to different things.
However, none of the people that had been identified as possible communists by him were identified as security risks by the Tydings Committe.
The Tydings Committee was partisan and bogus. I don't have transcripts to hand, but you'll find it was a bit of a whitewash. The Tydings Committee failed to investigate these charges properly, as they were supposed to do.
Notable cases where the charges were correct were Owen Lattimore, Philip Jessup, and John Stewart Service.
After they were cleared, the State Department started an internal witchhunt called the State Department's Loyalty Security Board and hounded many of them out of a job or dismissed them for made up reasons.
So, the State Department Loyalty Security Board worked on it for months and said some of them were security risks, and out they went. The Tydings Committee said all of them were not security risks. Who's more likely to be right? Do you really think that of the dozens of cases in the list, none of them were communists or security risks? Not even one? Doesn't that seem fishy to you? You'd think that, even by chance, there'd be one or two.
The original list of 205 wasn't produced by McCarthy sitting at home one day pulling out names from the State Department staff directory at random. It came from an FBI report that had been given earlier to the State Department. The FBI didn't choose names randomly either. Think about what the "I" stands for.
McCarthy wanted to know why more had not been done to investigate the charges in the report.
McCarthy definitely did not want to smear all of these people. When he made a speech in the senate listing the evidence against them, he refused to give the names of each of them, in case some of them turned out to be innocent. His opponents continuously interrupted him and asked for the names, but he refused to give them out in open session, to avoid the possibility of putting a black mark against an innocent man's name.
So much for McCarthy's witch hunt.
Every person was cleared by Congress, every one of them, as non-security risks.
They might have been "cleared" by a blanket statement by the Tydings Committee that McCarthy's list was rubbish, but many of them were later found to be security risks by other congressional committees, and by the State Department.
This is more an indictment of the Tydings committee than anyone else.
When it is the Constitutional right against self incrimination illegitimate?
Sometimes witnesses would plead the fifth when refusing to answer a question that wouldn't incriminate themselves. (For example, they were trying to protect others.)
Either way, when witnesses were pleading the fifth, something was definitely up. This goes against the common wisdom that McCarthy "didn't catch anyone."
But the newly (2003) released transcripts of McCarthy's hearings paint him as more of a professional asshole than a lunatic:
Actually, go and read them. Not articles about them, the actual transcripts. You'll be surprised at how little the common perception of McCarthy's investigations match reality. Be one of those people who knows the facts, not what's in the movies.
You'll mostly see him patiently questioning witnesses, many of whom plead the fifth amendment (sometimes legitimately, sometimes not.) He sounds just like a trial lawyer questioning a defendant. He's not an "asshole" any more than prosecuting attorneys are assholes. It's just that he's investigating security risks in the government, not conducting a criminal trial.
And after all those lives he destroyed in his pursuit of Communists,
List some lives he destroyed. Go on, try to find some names. This is another one of those urban legends about McCarthy. You won't find much.
how many did he catch? Zippo.
Well, in what sense was he supposed to "catch" them? He wasn't the FBI or the police. It wasn't his job to deal out indictments. In many cases, he drew attention to security risks who should be fired, and they were. Many people he questioned were clearly spies, communists, or covering for others who were. Often he was questioning members of the government about why security risks in the areas of their responsibility were not being removed or investigated.
McCarthy didn't know them. He ran around yelling about how he had a list, and it was entirely bogus.
He did have a list of security risks in the government. He made a famous speech in the Senate listing the cases and the evidence against them. I don't know in what sense you think that's "bogus."
In fact, that probably hindered the whole commie-tracking in the government, which needed doing.
This is a common hypothesis thrown out by McCarthy's political enemies, but it doesn't fit the facts. The FBI regularly made reports of security risks in the government (with evidence), especially in the State Department and the military, which were ignored. After McCarthy started his investigations and questioned people as to why this sort of thing was ignored, security was tightened and more people who were security risks were thrown out.