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Joe McCarthy first became visible to the world on February 9th, 1950, when he delivered a Lincoln Day address in West Virginia. That night he declared, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 members of the Communist Party still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Anti-communism was already a cause embraced by the Republican Party, McCarthy tapped into this current and turned it into a flood. Little more than five years later, after countless hearings and stormy speeches and after incalculabel damage to ordinary Americans and the nation, McCarthy's Senate colleagues voted unanimously to censure him for his reckless accusations and fabrications. We know today that not one prosecution resulted from McCarthy's investigations into communists in the U.S. government.