Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a farm boy from the Fox River Valley, grandson of Irish-German immigrants. Highly intelligent and industrious, a teenage poultry tycoon, and a war hero as well. But the truth was not in him, and he was a bully, and an alcoholic. May have been bi-polar as well.

From the early spring of 1950 to the summer of 1954, Joe McCarthy was one of the most popular and powerful politicians in the country, and certainly the most destructive.

How this man became an ism in the fifties, and the implications of his story for the America of today, is the business that occupies Larry Tye in his new biography Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, just out from Houghton Mifflin. It’s a revelatory book because Larry has hit the historian’s jackpot – unprecedented and exclusive access to McCarthy’s personal papers and official records, material kept secret for sixty years, but now providing lots of news and insights.