McCarthy was dangerous—“no bolder seditionist ever moved among us,” Richard H. Rovere wrote in his classic Senator Joe McCarthy—but much of the country was with him because he embodied, however boorishly, the forces of change. The Democrats had won every presidential election since 1932, and for much of that time had also enjoyed lopsided majorities in Congress. One party alone seemed responsible for the new postwar order, its failures as well as its successes, at a time of grand transformation for the country—from hemispheric giant to global superpower with commitments on every continent, and from land of rugged individualists to welfare state. For the new regime to flourish, Republicans had to make at least part of the agenda their own. Thus emerged the hope for a lasting bipartisan consensus.

Simon & Schuster

Eisenhower seemed a savior from central casting. He had guided 5 million Allied troops to victory in World War II and transcended grubby partisanship. He could have run on either party’s ticket and won; in fact, the Democrats courted him in 1948. But he was a Republican, and his victory in 1952 was smashing: 55 percent of the popular vote and 442 electoral votes. The trouble was his coattails. They were just wide enough to give the Republicans a one-vote advantage in the Senate—their second majority since the Herbert Hoover years, but not really a majority at all, Nichols explains, “because the conservative wing of the party numbered eight to twelve senators.” They were the aboriginal right—Old Guard isolationists and enemies of the New Deal. Many of them remained loyal to the incoming Senate majority leader, Robert Taft, who had lost the nomination to Eisenhower in a brutal contest, complete with allegations of delegate-stealing.

At first McCarthy, who had cleverly sidestepped Taft’s plea for an endorsement, said he was finished with his hunt for Communists in the government. In Eisenhower, “we now have a President who doesn’t want party-line thinkers or fellow travelers,” he told reporters. Henceforth his mission would be to root out “graft and corruption.” But this cause didn’t promise the attention he craved, the excitement and headlines that came with Red-hunting, the “permanent floating press conference,” as one writer has put it. Soon after Eisenhower took office, McCarthy reverted to his true self and began holding up high-profile foreign appointments—including Eisenhower’s choice for ambassador to Moscow, the Soviet expert Charles Bohlen. The delay was dangerous. Stalin died in early March, and no one knew who was in charge or where things would lead. The previous ambassador, George Kennan, had been recalled in October 1952, at the Soviets’ demand, leaving no one in his place to interpret Kremlin moves from the same close-up position. After a month-long delay, in late March Bohlen was confirmed.