What connection did Ronald Reagan have to Joseph McCarthy?

Answer 1

Reagan may have tried to help some actors that McCarthy's committee caused to be blacklisted. Surely he knew some of these people and had likely worked with them.

Bonzo Reagan did nothing to help those people that had been slandered, defiled and brow-beat by McCarthy and his brutal browbeating methods. McCarthy seized upon the idea of painting himself as a rapacious anti-communist Senator when he realized that due to his high number of missed committee meeting, missed votes (highest no-vote record in the Senate at the time), that his re-election was in serious jeopardy - he need to create a new facade, a he had watched the media covering the House Un-American activities hearings, so he began his own grand-stand in the Senate.

McCarthy engaged in a grand-standing outrageous charade designed to get him maximum press coverage and notoriety. He made claims of having pages of documented communist conspirators that had infiltrated the state department and the upper echelons of the military. These papers never existed, he made it up. He conducted a witch hunt that left thousands of people's careers destroyed and resulting in over 100 suicides, and not one truly subversive who had succeeded in getting into an even moderate level of the government.

To quote Senators Carl Levin and Susan Collins:

"Senator McCarthy's zeal to uncover subversion and espionage led to disturbing excesses. His browbeating tactics destroyed careers of people who were not involved in the infiltration of our government. His freewheeling style caused both the Senate and the Subcommittee to revise the rules governing future investigations, and prompted the courts to act to protect the Constitutional rights of witnesses at Congressional hearings... These hearings are a part of our national past that we can neither afford to forget nor permit to reoccur."