When you hear the phrase “witch hunt” propagandists have conditioned you to make an association with “McCarthyism” a period of time when it shrieked about clearing people loyal to the Soviet Union out of government positions. Various government departments harbored traitors such as the Rosenbergs and Hiss but the nexus was at State. With the aid of the left, McCarthyism- - inaccurately- - has come to mean accusations against innocent people and smearing them in public. But to put “McCarthyism” in perspective, the word itself was coined by the KGB in Moscow and first used in The Daily Worker, the communist party’s newspaper. The campaign against “McCarthyism”was initiated by Gus Hall in 1950 at a special session of the National Committee of the Communist Party and endorsed by Stalin himself in 1952. (Budenz, The Bolshevik Invasion of the West,124) Why? There was one simple reason: McCarthy’s exposures were gaining traction with the public and the left needed to shut him down.
