A flawed man who correctly pointed out that there were subversive commie agents in the US government.
Probably didn't play his cards as well as he could have.
Also, most of the "McCarthyism" you hear about happened later, under HUAC, with the Hollywood black lists. That (as far as I know) didn't have much to do with McCarthy.
Also, since Hollywood is made up of privately run companies, "black list" is just another way of saying "won't hire you because you are a bit of a scum bag and since it's my company I can pretty much hire who I want".
Here is a link that talks more about McCarthy. I'll post the relevant info below.
http://www.friesian.com/satan.htm
"it is possible that Eisenhower did no greater damage than when he decided that Joseph McCarthy was getting to be too much trouble. Indeed, the mythology of the New Deal pales in comparison to the lies and misrepresentations that have grown up around McCarthy. The way history is now presented, one might miss that there were anti-Communist Democrats like John Kennedy, or that Robert Kennedy had been a lawyer for McCarthy, made McCarthy the godfather of his eldest child (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend), and quietly attended McCarthy's funeral. Instead, Joe McCarthy is one of the most reviled men in history -- far worse than his distant adversary Joe Stalin, who was busily engaged in mass murder and, as we now know, bestowing his permission and blessing on the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950. Yet all McCarthy did, in the whole course of his brief career in the spotlight (1950-1954), was to complain about Communists and security threats in the State Department, in the Army, and in some other Federal programs -- for instance, why Communist authors were prominently featured in American Information Libraries overseas. And he was quite right about all of it, as we now know both from declassified American documents and from the access to Soviet records that historians briefly had in the 1990's.
McCarthy was popular and helped Eisenhower get elected in 1952. When he became a public figure in 1950, he exercised no power in the Democratically controlled Congress. The Democrats kept investigating and smearing him because of his (true) accusations about the State Department. With the Republicans gaining control of the Senate in 1953, McCarthy had a little more than a year to do actual investigations -- before Eisenhower decided (in a now popular turn of phrase) to throw him under the bus. Yet part of the common mythology about McCarthy is that somehow for years the Senator had been in charge of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that he was responsible for the blacklisting of Communists in Hollywood, and that "McCarthyism" consisted of falsely accusing people of being Communists in order to silence liberalism. None of this was true, and even the substance of the Censure of McCarthy in 1954 was simply for having been rude to members of the previous Congress -- a sanction unprecedented in American history. No other charges against him could be maintained to any standard liable to win a vote in the Senate, even among Democrats.
Yet now everyone "knows" that the Censure was for persecuting innocent people with false charges, especially those gifted and honest (Communists) in Hollywood. On a recent anniversary of the censure vote, an anchor on Fox News (Shepard Smith), supposedly the cat's paw of Conservativism, announced that McCarthy had "ruined the lives of hundreds of people". This was hardly possible in the brief period when McCarthy had any real power. A recent McCarthy scholar enjoys statements like this at his lectures, because he then asks the audience, "Name one." Respondents, if they can name anyone, characteristically name people who had nothing to do with McCarthy (e.g. the Communist Dalton Trumbo) or people who, from available evidence, almost certainly actually were Communists (e.g. Annie Lee Moss). The iconic American writer Dashiell Hammett, who was quite openly a Communist, did appear before McCarthy's committee (as a Communist author) but avoided trouble by taking the Fifth Amendment -- he had previously gone to jail for simply refusing to answer questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities"
"I see another example of Conservatives ritually willing to trash Joseph McCarthy in an August 6, 2009, column by Paul Greenberg, who says, "Joe McCarthy remained on the prowl for non-existent Communists in government, which meant the real ones might be overlooked." What is this even supposed to mean? If there were "real ones" in the government, who "might be overlooked," then there were real Communists, and not just "non-existent" ones, for McCarthy to look for. Doesn't Greenberg know that there were real Communists and spies? Greenberg is apparently assuming, ambiguously, the Democrat canard that there weren't any Communists and that anti-Communists were on a "witch-hunt" for non-existent witches.
This reminds me of one of the first things I remember hearing about McCarthy, when a high school teacher of mine said that McCarthy gave a speech where he waved a blank piece of paper and claimed it was a list of Communists in the State Department. This must have been a reference to McCarthy's Wheeling, West Virginia, speech in February 1950, which began McCarthy's career of public controversy; and the implication the teacher was conveying was that, not just that McCarthy may not have had the list with him, but that there was no such list -- and that McCarthy was blindly claiming that there were Communists when he really knew of none.
While McCarthy in fact did not have a list with him, this was not quite the nature of the controversy at the time. There was indeed a list, indeed two of them. And they were not McCarthy's own lists. The first was referred to in a letter from Secretary of State James Byrnes to Congressman Adolph Sabath in 1946. Byrnes said that 284 persons in the State Department had been found "unfit for permanent employment" and then 79 of them had left. The difference produced the number 205 that McCarthy had written in the original draft of his speech and that got out to the press at the time. However, McCarthy knew of a more recent list prepared by the House Appropriations Committee, which had been obtained by the Washington Times-Herald reporter Ed Nellor from House staffer Robert Lee. The House Committee identified 108 security risks in the State Department, of whom 57 were still there. This was the number McCarthy said he actually used in the Wheeling speech, and that he certainly used in subsequent speeches. Since the Wheeling speech had been broadcast but not recorded, Democrats decided to make an issue of whether McCarthy had used the 205 number or the 57 number.
It really doesn't matter which number McCarthy used. There were security risks in the State Department, and McCarthy wanted to know why they were there and what was being done about them. The centerpiece of McCarthy's speech was actually an attack on Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who, even as Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950, expressed his support for him -- "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." It is still part of leftist mythology that Hiss was neither a Communist nor a spy. Harry Truman himself later expressed doubt about Hiss's guilt. Yet the evidence against him at the time was decisive and damning, as it still is. One might wonder even today about the judgment and motives of anyone defending Hiss. The Democrats, including Truman, just did not like the political embarrassment; but it was not absurd for someone like McCarthy to wonder at the time if the protection of security threats and Communists was as much a matter of sympathy as of ass-covering. There is no doubt that someone like Acheson, ironically, felt a class connection with Hiss, sharing Northeastern and Ivy League backgrounds -- the beefy and brawling Whittaker Chambers was just declassé (attitudes we still get from the Modern Democrats, vacationing on Martha's Vineyard -- "Marxist Vineyard" -- and sneering at "fly-over country," i.e. the Heartland). Something of the sort had already happened in 1939. When Whittaker Chambers left the Communist Party, he quietly went on with his life -- although prudently saving some incriminating documents in case they became necessary. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, however, when the Communists became allies of those they had always claimed were their greatest enemies, Nazi Germany, Chambers became alarmed enough to tell his story at the State Department. This included information about Hiss's espionage and membership in the Party. The story got all the way to President Roosevelt, who literally laughed it off. Joe Stalin would not be spying on us, and certainly not through such a fine upstanding man as Alger Hiss. Communists then (and now) must have had a good laugh that the class solidarity of the well-born, privileged, and wealthy protected a man who worked to destroy them."
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Wrong strategy too.
