Volume 5, Number 6 · October 28, 1965
The Untold Story of McCarthy's Fall
By Richard H. Rovere
Days of Shame
by Charles E. Potter
Coward McCann, 304 pp., $5.95
In 1958, four years after his political collapse and one year after his death, I wrote a short book on Senator Joe McCarthy. It was not a formal biography but a character study of sorts, and I felt no obligation to make a record for the historians. There were, however, certain stories I wished to tell either because I thought them interesting in themselves or because they seemed relevant to my limited purposes. One that I very much wanted to tell, more because it was interesting than because it was relevant, was that of a former newspaperman named Thomas McIntyre, who was known to me and to others in Washington to have played an important but largely untold part in bringing McCarthy low. I had often heard him tell bits and pieces of his story, but in those days—1954 and 1955—I had no plan to write a book about McCarthy and so I made no notes. Nor, I found, had the other reporters who had listened to him by the hour at the Press Club bar. When I undertook the book, I wanted to get the story and to get it straight, but when I tried to run him down, I could find no trace of him. This didn't surprise me much. He had spent much of his life as a drifter—with several Skid Row interludes—and it was quite in character for him to have left no forwarding address when he headed out of Washington. After a while, I gave up and finished the book with no mention of him except in the acknowledgements. One thing I knew for certain was that I owed a large part of whatever understanding I had of McCarthy to those long sessions with Tommy McIntyre.
Review, 3406 words
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