Last year's film "Good Night and Good Luck" ressurrected the image of Joseph McCarthy, and I have found it interesting that many right wing pundits, in their zeal to attack George Clooney, have gone to great lengths to redeem the image of the tarnished senator.
The movie about Edward R. Murrow's efforts to bring down McCarthy is one political movie that was necessary for Hollywood to make. In fact, it was long overdue. Many actors, screenwriters, and other entertainers lost their livelihoods over the actions of McCarthy and his cronies, and even more of our popular culture was affected by the censorship (example: how many verses are there to the Woody Guthrie song "This Land is Your Land"? How many do you know? and WHY don't you know them?). While McCarthy may have been correct in his assertion that there were Communist operatives high within the US government, it was wholly wrong to do an "end around" to the US Constitution to capture them and to persecute and harass many Americans on what were later proven to be false allegations.
Even when the allegations of Communist/Socialist party membership were true, it is important to know that those memberships fell under the Constitutionally protected right to freedom of assembly.
I have many stories from McCarthyism in my personal files. J. Quinn Brisben, a longtime leader within the Socialist Party USA was a friend of mine (and my only son bears his name). Brisben was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee on the charge of teaching Marx in the classroom. Brisben's defense came from the fact that the quoted phrase had come, not from the Communist Manifesto, but from the Federalist Papers, a fact McCarthy's researchers had failed to look up.
Harvey Matusow was for several years, technically my stepfather, although I was well into adulthood when my mother married him. Harvey was Roy Cohn's chief witness in accusing various individuals of Communist Party membersip, and was one of the first to recant and to turn against Cohn and McCarthy, for which he served a sentence for perjury. Harvey, who went by the name of "Job" later in his life, was an egotist who was serving his own self interest, but McCarthy's crew took him at face value because of his ability to lie convincingly in front of a jury.
While history (in the form of recently declassified documents) has proven McCarthy's thesis to be right, namely, that there were Communist operatives at high levels of government, that does not in any way excuse his actions or the lives he ruined in his UnConstitutional attack on American citizens. It is a shame that certain right wing elements of the media would work so hard to defend the indefensible simply because they don't like the messenger.