On February 9, 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy stood in front of a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, gathered to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday, and claimed there were 205 members of the Communist Party working in the State Department. Worse, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, knew it. McCarthy didn’t have time to list the names, he said, but assured his audience that there were “traitors in the government.”13
