Talk:Joseph McCarthy

message: I believe it should be removed. Not much information in the article backs the notion that McCarthy was some awful racist. Furthermore, examine this roll call. McCarthy voted for cloture on a Fair Employment Practices Committee bill  to help put an end to racial discrimination. Total random nerd (talk) 01:30, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category:Racism in the United States 

message: Even among the greater part of sources cited, many of the claims given as concrete here are only suggested by the author at most, rather than being the words of the relevant person mentioned, or some other particular report.  An example is the allegation that Maj. Glen A. Todd, McCarthy's commanding officer (Not mentioned by name here), "revealed" that McCarthy had forged a letter of commendation from him.  In reality, this can be traced back to Thomas C. Reeves' "The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography" (1982).  Here, the writer cites a letter from Todd sent personally to him in 1977, although not given at length, in which he supposedly denied having written or signed the letter, and otherwise remarked that Admiral Nimitz would have signed many such documents without a personal investigation of their adequacy.  
Regarding the signature, there are conflicting reports in sources cited here - the text of the letter (Including in Reeves, 1982) appears to be derived from newspaper articles on McCarthy.  Some of the sources cited here make no mention of a signature from anyone other than Admiral Nimitz, and moreover some remove Maj. Todd from relation to it entirely, instead replacing him with Maj. Everett E. Munn.  Reeves claims this to be a mistake of yet another newspaper article which eventually became common.
Returning to Reeves on the matter of McCarthy's leg injury from during the course of the war, as he is again among the most commonly cited in books which do give references (See "The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy", 2009, cited here), these also appear to be mainly sourced from newspaper articles within his book;  Although, regarding an initial fracture, Reeves does cite a personal letter to himself from the doctor supposed to have put a cast on his leg, George B. Barnes.  It is unclear if the further remark claimed to be from McCarthy and placed before the relevant footnoting are also supposed to have been from this doctor.
The claim about McCarthy shooting "mainly at coconut trees", displayed twice in this article, appears mainly to be sourced from a number of sardonic comments made by McCarthy himself to the press, alongside, perhaps, interviews with Ken Smedley and W.H. Montfort, presented as former squadron members alongside McCarthy, cited by Reeves (Who presumably conducted them) in relation to stories of his being awarded a mock plaque "For destroying more coconut trees than anyone else in the South Pacific".  The claim that this itself is the beginning of the name "Tail Gunner Joe" does not appear to have a direct source.
Regarding his having claimed to have flown 32 "aerial missions", better sourcing is needed generally.  For the Distinguished Flying Cross, the medal awarded to him which is under scrutiny, 25 combat flights were what were needed.  To To give the beginning of an investigation, Reeves also claimed that Maj. Todd, in an interview, said to have only certified 11 such flights, and that Smedley, Montfort, Munn, Wander (Another squadron member), and Todd all strongly denied the possibility of 32 combat flights during his time.
To finish, much of the sourcing in this section is considerably dubious and unduly second-hand.  Other citations bring the seriousness of the section into question even more directly.  The very page cited here in "Tapestry: The History and Consequences of America's Complex Culture" (2014) alleges that McCarthy lied about serving combat missions, or any missions whatsoever, as a gunner aboard a Marine Corps plane (The book claims he lied about serving on a B-17;  Barring a source saying otherwise, this seems its own confusion, as he demonstrably served on a dive bomber);  That he falsely obtained a Purple Heart through his claims about a war injury;  And that he had "shamelessly campaigned on the premise that the Holocaust was a lie" in order to win over "German Catholic" voters in his region, having even done so successfully.  The first two of these are demonstrably false, again, while the the third is so utterly bewildering and absent from any other mention of this notorious political figure I have seen that I must wonder what level of invention has been stooped to in its writing.  This appears also to be the source where the supposed safety of all of McCarthy's actual combat missions is drawn from.
I hope I had already been clarifying, there are a number of allegations currently put forth as truth in this article, which are either entirely spurious, such as what has just been mentioned, and the claim that Maj. Glen A. Todd "revealed" a forgery (To name two), or are entirely unfit for this section of an encyclopedic article (Other claims about the safety of real combat missions, forgery stated as a fact without actual citations, "coconut trees").
I have not yet searched for the original newspaper articles, many of them from more local Wisconsin publications, from which so many allegations find their most original source to the utmost degree of thoroughness.  For a complete rewriting and expunging of falsehood in this section, which is what is needed, I recommend the tracking down of these, if I do not rewrite the section and expunge its trash first. Zusty001 (talk) 15:13, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Every one of your assertions are asinine and incorrect. The ramblings of a left wing idiot. 64.179.175.53 (talk) 22:45, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: You must have failed to read, or otherwise to understand, much of what I wrote, considering how much of it has to do with questioning claims found in certain cited works of McCarthy lying, fabricating things, using false or undesirable apparatuses for political gain, and so on. Zusty001 (talk) 02:11, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Military Service;  Quality of sources 

message: This comment is based upon the [currently] Latest revision as of 05:04, 10 February 2023 of the article. 
The second sentence of the paragraph starting with "Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin", (which is the third paragraph in the "lede" part of the above mentioned version or "revision" of the article) still says:Following the end of World War II, he attained the rank of major.However, this seems to be contradicted by a sentence (later in the article) (in the third paragraph of the "Military service" sub-section of the "Career" section) that says:McCarthy remained in the Marine Corps Reserve after the war, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Also, "note" that the "Military service" section of the Infobox at the top of the article contains an entry that agrees with the sentence that says "lieutenant colonel". 
Shouldn't the sentence that says << "Following the end of World War II, he attained the rank of major" >> be changed? It seems to be wrong. 
OR ... would that sentence be correct, if it were to specify that it is focusing [only] on his time in the Marine Corps, as opposed to the Marine Corps Reserve? --Mike Schwartz (talk) 06:40, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inconsistency regarding rank attained after [[World War II]]