The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead of bothering to stay behind to follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless he was or how little it all meant to him. It was news and he was news; that was all that mattered. “McCarthy was a dream story,” said Willard Edwards, of the Chicago Tribune. “I wasn’t off page one for four years.” Edwards, with his paper’s
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