Joseph Raymond McCarthy was born on November 14, 1908, in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, and died on May 2, 1957, in Bethesda, Maryland. The product of a rural midwestern background, McCarthy was an ambitious young man who studied law and became a circuit judge in 1940. He served in the Marines during World War II and fabricated his heroism as “Tailgunner Joe.” He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, but his fame resulted from his adoption of the anti-Communist cause in early 1950. A bold and uncompromising partisan, he fiercely attacked the administrations of both President Harry S. Truman and President Dwight D. Eisenhower for harboring Communists and Communist sympathizers within the federal government. He easily won reelection in 1952 on an anti- Communist platform and became a national figure notorious for hectoring witnesses at the Senate hearings he chaired and implying that they were hiding their own Communist leanings or protecting other members of the Communist Party.