Senator Joe McCarthy

Richard Rovere, a longtime New Yorker staff writer who died in 1979, combined three all-too-rare journalistic traits--legwork, style, and bravery--to create this 1959 J'accuse, which Walter Lippman called "the definitive job." Rovere had a handle on the particulars, as illustrated by his surgical disassembly of Joe McCarthy's fantastic autobiography, and the abstract principles, as illustrated by his comment that McCarthy's victories were mostly in "matters of an almost cosmic insignificance." His causes celebres were causes ridicules. The University of California Press is to be congratulated for this paperback reissue. After all, even if anticommunism is on sabbatical, demagoguery is not, and it pays to stay up on the tricks of the trade.