Chapter 191
Chapter 191
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Translator: crow
Chapter Title: McCarthy
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Korea didn't just make moves in China.
Once the ripple effects from the disappearance of Chinese scientists had died down, the KCIA swung its blade again in the United States.
'Looks like those helpful friends sent another letter.'
McCarthy tore open a thick stack of documents that had arrived from somewhere.
It was another tip-off from an anonymous source.
McCarthy decided to devour this prey just as deliciously as the last.
Names like Wernher von Braun, John von Neumann, and Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück climbed onto McCarthy's list.
"Look at this! Communists have been hiding in our scientific community like this! Even Oppenheimer, who worked on the Manhattan Project, turned out to be a red commie!"
Oppenheimer wasn't a communist, but he was already branded as one and completely ruined.
There was no issue with pounding him like a punching bag.
As McCarthy waved the list around, the American scientific community trembled in fear.
"Ah, can't someone shut up that mad dog?"
Finally, NACA stepped up to refute McCarthy's logic.
"Dr. von Braun is a scientist faithfully serving the interests of the United States. He is absolutely not a communist."
"Is that so? Then who handed rocket technology to the Soviets?"
There was no evidence—just blind attacks.
You explain yourself.
In the arena McCarthy had created, he was God, prosecutor, and judge.
"No, that's ridiculous."
"Prove it's not!"
At least von Braun was lucky.
NACA saw him as essential talent and protected him thoroughly.
Von Neumann also received protection from the U.S. government, which valued him highly.
But Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück wasn't so fortunate.
Max Delbrück wasn't an academic with the same level of prestige as the others.
Under relentless attacks from HUAC and McCarthy, Delbrück had no choice but to pack his bags and leave the university.
'Germany, my homeland, has just started rebuilding. Do they even have the conditions for research?'
Delbrück sighed at the situation.
His first worry was how to make a living going forward.
He already had four children with his wife.
As he pondered taking up manual labor, a mysterious letter arrived.
"From an admirer who respects you, Doctor. America has abandoned you. Why not work in a place that truly recognizes your scientific talent, rather than a country that doesn't? If you're interested, we'd like to invite you to Pyongyang."
A generous amount for a plane ticket was enclosed at the bottom.
Delbrück discussed it with his wife.
"Of course we should go."
"But Korea's some unfamiliar Eastern land."
"No. They say there are a lot of Germans living there."
A German community?
Delbrück leaned a bit toward going to Korea at those words.
"You can't do anything here anyway. Let's leave before you end up like Dr. Oppenheimer."
At the mention of Oppenheimer, Delbrück made up his mind.
In this way, German scientists wounded by McCarthy's blade boarded flights to Korea.
America knew scientists were leaving but didn't think much of it.
If they were fleeing McCarthy's knife in search of a livelihood, it was hard to complain.
Even the devilish tongue that tormented others brought crisis to McCarthy himself.
"I'm innocent, I tell you. This is a frame job!"
When an Air Force officer was unjustly forced to retire, he tipped off journalists Edward Murrow and Fred Friendly.
Murrow and Friendly verified the officer's claims and decided to report on it.
"You two are crazy? The guy's McCarthy!"
McCarthy was a heavyweight even the Stevenson administration couldn't handle lightly.
Touching such a formidable foe.
The network immediately applied pressure.
The military didn't stay silent either.
"We fired a commie through due process!"
But the two journalists bravely went ahead with the broadcast.
"As expected, that bastard's a raving lunatic. A mad dog needs a stick."
The Stevenson administration, watching the broadcast, decided to pick up the stick.
They were already annoyed by Republican Senator McCarthy's antics.
There was no need to spare him even a speck.
The FBI immediately began digging into McCarthy's surroundings.
"You red bastards! McCarthy is the shield protecting our nation!"
The Republicans defended McCarthy fiercely based on partisan lines.
McCarthy resisted desperately as well.
"The Democratic administration is crawling with commies. Just thinking about how many secrets they've sold out since the Roosevelt era is horrifying!"
McCarthy was cornered by the Stevenson regime's offensive but still confronted the administration backed by his powerful support base.
"Murrow, that guy's someone we can't just leave alone."
Murrow and Friendly, who had attacked McCarthy, created the program *See It Now* and launched a second assault.
"There wasn't a single truth mixed in with McCarthy's claims."
Murrow and Friendly dissected the truth and lies in McCarthy's barrage of assertions, attacking him sharply.
"I'll refute it myself."
McCarthy hurriedly sent a rebuttal, but it was so poor it became a laughingstock, not even qualifying as an explanation.
"McCarthy, that guy was like a demon biting others, but now that it's his turn, he's squirming like a worm."
Public opinion increasingly turned against McCarthy.
Even so, he didn't collapse all at once.
Unlike in original history, McCarthy held on tenaciously for two reasons.
One was that attacking Stevenson instead of war hero Eisenhower drew less public backlash.
Eisenhower was from McCarthy's Republican Party, but Stevenson was a Democrat, so he could count on partisan protection.
The other was that he hadn't attacked the U.S. Army.
In original history, McCarthy fell after angering Eisenhower by targeting the Army, but here he avoided that.
It wasn't that McCarthy had suddenly turned nice; it was just advantageous under partisan logic to leave the Army—opposed to Stevenson—alone.
As a result, McCarthy's downfall didn't unfold as abruptly or dramatically as in original history.
Even under relentless media pounding, he survived quietly under partisan protection.
The KCIA was watching this unfold.
"If this keeps up, McCarthy's done for."
"We need to gift him a reversal card before that."
The KCIA had secured a card to strike the Stevenson administration just recently.
It was something prepared on the Leader's orders as well.
KCIA External Operations Chief Han Yun-su arranged to mail the prepared package to McCarthy.
A few days later, McCarthy took the podium amid jeers.
"I understand the jeers and mockery you're directing at me. But I want to make one thing clear: At least I'm not a hypocrite pretending to be on the side of justice."
"What bullshit are you spouting?"
McCarthy waved the documents he'd received from the KCIA.
"This is the true face of this country. See how the reds have toyed with free citizens."
The congressmen who picked up the documents McCarthy tossed looked stunned.
"No way—this happened in Alabama?"
What McCarthy had unleashed was a secret experiment ongoing since 1932.
In Tuskegee, Alabama, they lied to poor Black people about treating them and instead infected them with syphilis.
Then they observed the progression to study the disease's dangers.
It was a diabolically inhumane human experiment.
The Black victims wanted treatment, but the authorities ensured experimental subjects didn't get it when they came to the hospital.
When Black soldiers from Tuskegee who enlisted in the Army sought treatment, that was blocked too.
Even after penicillin was developed and syphilis became treatable, the authorities refused to treat the Black victims.
People were speechless at this horrific revelation.
"Am I wrong? How moral is the U.S. government, calling me a witch hunter? Aren't I better than those reds?"
The tide turned with this single attack.
Now the momentum of the offensive shifted to McCarthy.
"The Stevenson administration needs to answer: Blacks may be somewhat inferior, but that doesn't justify trampling them like this."
The Stevenson administration fell silent.
They couldn't dodge blame by saying it was a previous regime—Roosevelt's administration had been Democratic too.
And the Tuskegee syphilis experiment was still ongoing.
"Who the hell leaked this?!"
"We'll have to investigate, but aren't the Soviets behind it?"
"Those reds again? Unbelievable. So the material McCarthy's waving came from red hands?"
"Probably."
Almost no one suspected Korea.
All the suspicious figures who'd visited Tuskegee were white.
The possibility of a Korean racially was extremely low.
However, the FBI overlooked one thing.
They could outsource the investigation.
The Stevenson administration took a fatal hit from the Tuskegee scandal.
With one blow inflicting a mortal wound on the Democratic regime, McCarthy rose as the Republican hero overnight.
"That guy's spouting nonsense, sure, but he gave those Democrats a good smackdown."
McCarthy thus maintained his presence and survived in politics.
And he kept swinging the blade on his tongue steadily.
"That one's a red! A commie, I say!"
McCarthy continued sowing chaos from the shadows in America.
No one knew when his reign of terror would end.
The one certainty was it wouldn't end before the Stevenson administration did.