It feels fated that I should have finished this thickly-detailed and highly readable study of Joe McCarthy late in the evening of November 6, 2020, when Americans were anxiously biting our nails over the outcome of the close-fought presidential election. Last night, I read of McCarthy's downfall, censure, and ostracism, to his miserable death due primarily to rampant alcoholism and resulting liver disease, hallucinations, seizures, and possibly a malignant reaction to the drugs used to treat him. Today, Joe Biden has defeated Trump for the presidency after four years of behavior and character that could have been scripted by McCarthy himself, or by McCarthy and Trump's best buddy and advisor, Roy Cohn (who has to be one of world's most fascinating slimeballs).

The parallels are breathtaking. The lies, the greed, the tax dodging, the payoffs, the opportunism, the crusades against and vilifications of anyone who disagreed with them; the fast-food diets, the snotty nicknames to mock opponents, the utter disregard for anyone (friend or foe) or anything (that pesky thing called law), that gets in their way. Trump makes fun of someone's disability; McCarthy browbeats and torments a lowly clerk because once she spoke with a labor organizer who had the same name as an alleged Communist. Yet somehow these men both tap into a fear and anger - manufactured by the demagogues themselves - that only they can vanquish, and hordes line up to pay homage. Until, one day, they don't.

Tye has had unprecedented access to McCarthy's private papers, sealed by McCarthy's widow for 50 years, archives of journalists who covered McCarthy, interviews with surviving aides and their families, even his medical records from Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he spent a LOT of time for illnesses and injuries due to stress, overwork, and way way way too much booze. It was known in DC social circles that you never left Joe alone with any young females... he flirted with a friend's thirteen-year-old daughter, flipped her a quarter, winked, and said "Call me when you're 19." (Yeah, there's that too.) The bibliography is huge, the footnotes well-selected and formatted. This is a headlong, deep dive into one of our most notorious demagogues, fascinating and disturbing.

My husband's father served in Germany in Patton's Third Army. After the war, he would occasionally say, even when my husband was just a boy, that "It could happen here, you know." We learn from Tye that one of McCarthy's most-despised government agencies was the Army Signal Corps, which he targeted and battered repeatedly as a nest of subversion and Commie spies. Careers were ruined. My father-in-law was assigned to the Signal Corps. So now we know even better what he meant. Not only CAN it happen here, it DID. And let us hope we survive the latest attempt and do better. ( )

Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye is a comprehensive and well-written biography that reads almost like a novel, albeit a dystopian one at times.

I'll be honest, when I started the book I was anticipating almost 500 pages of interesting information but, like many long nonfiction books, presented in a rather dry manner. This is a period of American (anti)intellectual history I find quite intriguing so I was ready to just deal with it. But this book is engaging and kept me wanting to read more. No easy task when dealing with a figure that can stir so many strong, negative emotions. The writing is part of what made me round my rating up.

The other aspect that cinched the rating is that much of this information is newly released, which means no matter how much we have read about McCarthy or the period, there is new information here. Any book that can present new material from primary sources, and in an engaging manner, deserves a solid rating.

There will be a few points where the reader will feel a small bit of sympathy for McCarthy. That is a credit to Tye presenting such a vile human being in his full humanity and not just the inhumanity he showed to his fellow humans and countrymen. But that sympathy is short-lived and, for me, quickly overcome. Karma can be a, well, you know, especially when a cowardly bully loses the ability to bully. Then they become a shell of the person they were before, which was a shell of a real person. Yeah, I despise McCarthy and what he helped to do to this country, and I don't apologize for it.

We get glimpses at both McCarthy's personal life and the closed door behind the scenes wheeling and dealings on Capital Hill. While revisiting the events can stir anger and frustration, Tye keeps us focused on the larger arc of the book, namely McCarthy's life in total, which keeps us looking ahead as well as behind.

By ahead we also mean all the way to the newest bully on the block, little Donnie Trump. There is a highly publicized connection between McCarthy and Trump, one pathetic man named Roy Cohn. Between Trump's connection with Cohn and Roger Stone, we can easily see what type of snake Trump is: part McCarthy, part Nixon, and part feces.

I highly recommend this to those interested in this specific period of US history, as well as readers who enjoy well-written biographies. I think that even those on the far right who might still find some redeeming quality in McCarthy will find enough here to keep them reading, though beware, at almost 500 pages it is far longer than the Dr Suess books you're used to.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )