He had help …

… Morning’s Canvas: Revisiting Joe McCarthy.

Tom Wicker's Shooting Star, a superbly informative and scrupulously documented study, gives readers (in the book's 200 pages) a compact, easily accessible portrait of one of American history's most fascinating and most seriously flawed politicians. … However, as Wicker suggests in Shooting Star, perhaps McCarthy should not bear too much of the shame for the country's anti-communist hysteria; there were plenty of politicians, journalists, and citizens who supported and enabled McCarthy's inquisition; they, also, share responsibility for one of this country's most troublesome and shameful periods - an era during which paranoia, isolationism, political extremism, spurious allegations, and intolerance became acceptable.