The Kennedys and Joe McCarthy
When it comes to the Kennedys, America’s “royal family,” as they say, most Americans at one time were at least vaguely familiar with the legend. They knew about Joe Jr.’s death in World War II, and about John F.’s heroics in the Pacific after a Japanese destroyer cut the PT 109 in half. They knew about touch football games at the Hyannisport “compound,” and saw the photographs of JFK sailing the Victura around Nantucket. And, of course, they knew that John F. and his little brother Robert F. couldn’t possibly have died at the hands of “lone gunmen.” Both were the victims of wide-ranging, yet-to-be revealed conspiracies. And surely many knew about the harem of floozies, from Gloria Swanson to Judith Exner, that family patriarch Joe Kennedy and JFK kept on call.
Yet most Americans were and are as equally ignorant of one chapter in the clan’s meticulously documented saga. They know almost nothing about the Kennedys’ strong friendship — personal and political — with someone that mainstream historians and the leftist mainstream media have portrayed as the most dangerous, terrifying figure of the mid-20th century. They know nothing about the Kennedys’ close alliance with this man because the media — and certainly the hard-left, contemporary Kennedys — don’t want them to know.
The truth about the strong if not loving friendship and political alliance between the Kennedys and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) is rarely, if ever, discussed. It doesn’t fit with the myth of Camelot, or the myth of McCarthy’s sulfurous maleficence.
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