Larry Tye with Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy

The best-selling author of Bobby Kennedy will discuss his new, definitive biography of the most dangerous demagogue in American history, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy destroyed many careers and even entire lives, whipping the nation into a frenzy of paranoia, accusation, loyalty oaths, and terror. When the public finally turned on him, he came crashing down, dying of alcoholism in 1957. Only now, through bestselling author Larry Tye’s exclusive look at the senator’s records, can the full story be told. Based on first-ever review of his personal and professional papers, medical and military records, and recently unsealed transcripts of his closed-door Congressional hearings, Demagogue is a masterful portrait of a human being whose chaotic, meteoric rise is a gripping and terrifying object lesson for us all.

Larry Tye is the best-selling author of Bobby Kennedy and Satchel, as well as Superman, The Father of Spin, Home Lands, and Rising from the Rails, and co-author, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. Previously an award-winning reporter and national writer at the Boston Globe and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, he now runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship.