The Nightmare Decade; The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy

New York: Random House, 1971. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xi, [1], 626, [2] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Price clipped. Red 'H" at bottom of fep. DJ has some wear, soiling, edge tears and chips. Fred James Cook (March 8, 1911 - April 4, 2003) was an American investigative journalist whose prime years of reporting spanned from the 1950s to the late 1970s. Fred J. Cook was a longtime staff writer for the New York World Telegram and Sun. Called by Studs Terkel "the finest investigative reporter in the land, His 1964 exposé, The FBI Nobody Knows, was central to the plot of one of Rex Stout's most popular Nero Wolfe novels, The Doorbell Rang. While editor of the weekly New Jersey Courier in Lakewood, New Jersey, he covered the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. Having witnessed the airship flying overhead at Toms River, New Jersey, he first wrote about its anticipated safe arrival at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, then had to quickly rewrite the story after getting to the crash site while the ship was still in flames. Derived from a Kirkus review: The scarifying, stultifying late forties-early fifties Age of McCarthy is reconstructed as background for this political biography of the Senator. Cook plots McCarthy's career from his early days in Wisconsin politics to his downfall at Army hands. The expose is literate, sure and rich, reminiscent of Cook's FBI, Hiss and Warfare State books. Cook firmly states that McCarthy was a vicious hysteric financed by wealthy and reputable Americans including Joe Kennedy and assorted oil moguls; at the same time, he implies that if someone was in fact a Communist or leftwing socialist he might indeed have been guilty of something. The biography is well-synthesized.