Joe McCarthy | Gangs | My Bloody Life

RALPH:

I was searching Joe McCarthy to find out who the witness was who finally called his bluff and brought the whole ugly era crashing down.

I came across your piece about Mogan but still don't know who finally shot down McCarthy. Can you help?

(This query is the result of seeing British MP George Galloway beating Sen Norm Coleman to a pulp on May 17)

As far as we can recall --- and we watched all of the Army McCarthy Hearings of 1954 --- Joe McCarthy was brought down not by the "liberals," nor their lawyer, Joseph Welch, but by Joe McCarthy ... with the assistance of a relatively new invention, live national network television.

Before that, from 1949 to 1954, Joe McCarthy was a mysterious presence on the front pages of the newspaper and in the magazines of the times, a man who seemed a magician, who could find subversives and deviants where no one else had been able to find them before.

When the Army-McCarthy hearings began in the summer of 1954, he was, thus, an unknown, or better, an invisible figure, preaching the gospel of unknown evil permeating our very halls of government and the military. What he did not know, what eveyone else seemed to know, was that you do not tangle with the United States military ... ever.

So on American television there was a new face: a man with dark eyebrows and a menacing way and a fearful growling voice, one who accused all who opposed him as being disloyal, traitors to our security, to the country. A strange concept, no? If you oppose me, you are automatically a Benedict Arnold.

And, as he spoke to us, from that solemn Senate Chamber, there was, at every moment, a young man with dark moon eyes whispering in his ear. Even as he spoke, this man, Roy Cohn, was whispering in his ear. (What? We never found out.) Whispering, whispering for all the world to see, but not to hear.

After weeks of this, the angry Senator, with the never-smiling viperish man at his ear, started to stop being a force to be contended with in America. He had been brought down by his own spooks.

RALPH:

I was ones a gangmember in the streets of L.A. Like Reymundo I struggled To find my way out. I spent many of my juvenile years behind giant block walls, from juvi hall to probation camps, and fighting the law in trials to avoid C.Y.A (California Youth Authority).

Since then, my life has took a turn. As I write Im on my way to a college dagree, and I want to get my Masters from a Cal State. My goal is to be a probation officer and i've allready taken the first step.

I currently work for a boys home, I work with juvinilles that are to emotionaly disturbed to reicive a jail term. Many are gang members, like I once was.

When I finished reading My Bloody Life couldnt help not let tears fall down. Reymundo wrote the words I have been looking for but could not find. Now after reading his book, I feel with much more courage to fight the costant battle to success.