nope, at long last, he had no decency
No shortage of recent conservative writers—Ann Coulter, of course, comes to mind—have tried to give Sen. Joe McCarthy partial credit for his hunt for Communists in all corners of public society; it turned out that there were Communists in government, after all. Not so fast, says author Ronald Kessler:
The FBI agents who actually chased Soviet spies have a very different perspective.
…
[Former FBI agent Robert J.] Lamphere (who died in 2002), told me in an interview that agents who worked counterintelligence were appalled that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initially supported McCarthy. True enough, the Venona intercepts revealed that hundreds more Soviet spies had operated in the government than was believed at the time.“The problem was that McCarthy lied about his information and figures,” Lamphere said. “He made charges against people that weren’t true. McCarthyism harmed the counterintelligence effort against the Soviet threat because of the revulsion it caused.”
It makes sense, then, that certain writers would defend Sen. McCarthy, despite the harm he did to his own side.