McCarthy was, in Richard Rovere’s phrase, the political speculator who found his gusher. He was perfectly positioned by dint of his own roots and his constituency: He was an Irish Catholic, who had been urged to take up the issue by an official at Georgetown University, and he had a large German-American population in his home state of Wisconsin, where much of the population accepted the world as defined by the oracle of the region—Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
