WASHINGTON, May 5: Fifty years after Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s scorched earth investigation into supposed communist infiltration of America’s most sensitive institutions, transcripts released on Monday from his secret hearings add more tarnish to his place in history.

The 5,000 pages show no smoking guns, no uncovered spies, no verification of the conspiracy theories on which he built is political career.

“McCarthy had shopworn goods and fishing expeditions,” said Don Ritchie, the US Senate’s associate historian.

No one McCarthy summoned ever went to jail — even the few who were convicted of contempt later won on appeal. But his probes ruined lives and destroyed careers and livelihoods, with his unproven hints of communist taint.

He called a few celebrities before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Composer Aaron Copland, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett are among those who appear in these files. But mostly he picked on the obscure and the expendable, file clerks, engineers, mid-level bureaucrats. Many lost their jobs.

McCarthy remains a riveting figure, and while these 1953-54 texts may inspire new scholarship, they will largely “confirm what most people thought about him,” said Ritchie, who began poring over reams of onionskin paper transcripts in 1976.

A Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy served in the Senate for only a decade and his headline-grabbing investigations lasted a mere two years. His final years, from his censure in 1954 until his death in 1957, he served in relative oblivion.

The red-baiting phenomenon known as McCarthyism was longer and deeper than Joe McCarthy himself. Anti-communist probes, sometimes camouflage for attacks on organized labour or early civil rights activism, dated back to the 1930s and intensified in the late 1940s with the Cold War.

Some of the most famous hearings, like those involving the “Hollywood Ten” blacklisted screenwriters, unfolded before McCarthy came on the scene.

Ironically, it was McCarthy and his excesses that not only gave a name to the anti-communist drive, it was also McCarthy and his excesses that brought about its end.

“McCarthy in a sense discredited the anti-communist movement. Once he was censured, the whole anti-communist issue dried up,” Ritchie said in a recent interview.

Perusing the transcripts, released online (http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/psi.htm) and in the Senate hearing room where McCarthy held forth, shows that McCarthy in private was like McCarthy in public, only worse.

His interrogation of an obscure engineer named Benjamin Zuckerman, who had worked briefly with the US Army Signal Corps, was a good example of his brow-beating style.

Zuckerman testified that on his rare encounters — four in eight years — with a former college acquaintance later implicated in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case, the two young men had talked about women, audio equipment, and the best way to cook eggs. McCarthy snarled that he was “either the damnest liar” or “a case for a mental institution.”

The documents were released in a joint venture authorized by Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Susan Collins Maine, then respectively the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, McCarthy’s platform. The customary 50 years have passed. Most participants are dead.

Yet McCarthy remains a polarizing figure, and still has his champions on the right. More books have been written on him than any other 20th century senator, except for a handful who ran for or served as president, Ritchie said.

Eventually McCarthy’s tactics caught up with him, and the Senate censured him in 1954 after he tried to impugn the loyalty of the US Army.

But not before he had ruined lives, destroying careers and livelihoods, provoking one documented suicide with his unproven hints of communist taint. His “take no prisoners” approach also contributed to a climate of intense political conformity, a distrust of dissent.

Although his witnesses would appear in private, McCarthy often made sure word got out to favoured reporters — his version, with the most negative spin possible, Ritchie said. Some lost their jobs.

Ritchie recalled that shortly before McCarthy aide Roy Cohn died, he dismissed allegations that he had destroyed lives by saying, “Name them.”

“Here they are, these are the names,” said Ritchie.—Reuters