The Death of Tailgunner Joe

Everyone who ran into Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) that spring of 1957 had a vivid memory of how ill he was—jaundiced skin, unsteady balance, intermittent focus. It was a stunning contrast to the town bully who, a mere seven years before, had captivated the nation with his unsubstantiated charge that there were pinkos lurking behind every pillar at an out-of-touch State Department—and who, on the eve of his 1954 showdown with the U.S. Army, had the backing of a full 50 percent of his countrymen and the swagger that went with it.

“My last view of him was that of a drunk shuffling down a street near the Capitol,” said Irish-American historian George Reedy. “He was closing out the dark side of the victims of the Famine.” Speechwriter Ed Nellor paid the senator a long visit and remembered him as “dazed” and “punchdrunk.” At 1 the next morning McCarthy phoned Nellor at home, rousing his ex-aide from bed to ask when he might be dropping by. He had forgotten! At a meeting of the Wauwatosa School Board, a librarian from McCarthy’s home-state Milwaukee Journal observed Joe in need of rescue from the board’s cloakroom, where he’d become hopelessly entangled in coats and hardly was able to speak. When editors at the Journal heard about that, they assigned reporter Edwin Bayley full-time to writing the obituary of the pugnacious ex-Marine the world had come to know as Tailgunner Joe.

to be saying his goodbyes and asking for a kind of redemption. Two-and-a-half years earlier, his Senate colleagues had taken the rare step of condemning him for his incivility, although not for the. As you know, I don’t always agree with what you say but this column I know tells the truth’…We exchanged a few pleasantries and I thanked him. That was the end of the conversation…I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He was a very lonesome guy.”