McCarthy’s originality lay in exploiting HUAC’s slander-to-public-opinion tactic, not inventing it.

Evidence

The interrogation of `unfriendly witnesses’ was, after all, intended to slander the persons concerned as communists or communist sympathizers and then hand them over to public opinion. Although McCarthy’s name came to symbolize the period, his only originality lay in using this strategy in a particularly unscrupulous and effective way, and in exploiting it to the hilt to further his own political career. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 414

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s ongoing theme of how the Institute under Horkheimer and Adorno read anti-communist repression pragmatically. — connects to: Targeted Southern Democrats carried anti-union lawmaking to Congress and HUAC — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 226; McCarthy’s distinctiveness was tactical, not strategic — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1670
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Targeted Southern Democrats carried anti-union lawmaking to Congress and HUAC — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 226; McCarthy’s distinctiveness was tactical, not strategic — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1670