10 People Who Give America a Bad Reputation

Potentially controversial, this list looks at 10 people (some dead, some living) whose actions have cast a shadow across the reputation of the United States of America. Criminals such as serial killers were left off the list, since they do not affect external opinions on American society very much for better or worse.

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have set themselves up as black men who defend black people. They make no excuses for their racism, but if pressed, they usually claim that they are patently not racist, and for any white person to accuse them of such makes the accuser racist. They claim that all they do is stand up for equal rights for black people.

But the problem is that black people now have all the rights white people have in the United States. They have them equally, both in quantity and quality. It is true that blacks did not have equal rights under the law for a very long duration of the USA’s history, but with the outstanding work of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights Movement did just that: moved to the end of the line and accomplished all its goals.

Sharpton and Jackson don’t see it that way. They openly criticize white people at the instant a crime against blacks hits the news, as they both did most shamefully in the 2006 Duke University Lacrosse Scandal. That case involved a black prostitute named Crystal Mangum, performing a striptease for three members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team, during which they insulted her and she insulted them and left angrily.

She later accused them all of rape, and it was discovered after many months that she had, in truth, lied about the rape. She had not been raped, or even touched by any of the players. Her credibility in court was completely destroyed after having had sex with multiple men earlier in the week, and using a vibrator during a previous performance that day for a different couple in a hotel. She was also drunk and intoxicated with Flexerin at the time of the incident.

But before any of this came to light, Sharpton was already on Fox News defending Mangum as a black woman brutalized by white men. He compared the case to that of Abner Louima, who was severely beaten and sodomized by white NYC police officers, in 1997. He stated to Bill O’Reilly, “First of all, the authorities have charged there was a crime… When the prosecutors went forward, they clearly have said this girl is the victim, so why would we be trying the victim?” When O’Reilly mentioned recent news reports that DNA testing had failed to match any of the defendants, Sharpton said, “I think that all of the facts that you have laid out the DA had – and I know this DA is probably not one that is crazy. He would not have proceeded if he did not feel that he could convict.”

Jackson had this to say about the Lacrosse case, “[This] fantasy’s as old as slave masters impregnating young slave girls… The character of this thing is chilling [and] [s]omething happened that everybody’s ashamed of.” But the term “slave masters” makes no sense, given that the lacrosse players did not ask the escort service for a black stripper. They asked for a white one.

Once all the facts of the case came to light, and Michael Nifong, the lead prosecutor, was discovered to be thoroughly amoral, neither Sharpton nor Jackson apologized for jumping to conclusions. They still haven’t, to date. This is an excellent example of why people are “innocent until proven guilty” in the USA. There was no proof, but Sharpton’s and Jackson’s smoldering hatred for white people compelled them to denounce the lacrosse players without real proof.

Jackson even threatened Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign, when Obama gave a stern lecture to black fathers about the importance of raising their children properly. Jackson, while being interviewed on Fox News, had this to say while he thought the microphone was off, “See, Barack’s been, ahh, talking down to black people on this faith-based… I want to cut his nuts out.”

They would never say so out loud, of course, but Sharpton and Jackson have made their feelings clear by means of a lot of inflammatory rhetoric, that they are of the opinion that blacks were treated so horribly from the founding of the country until even the present day as to deserve compensation. Whether this should be in the form of money or power or anything else, the fact is that blacks, whites and all other legalized citizens of the United States of America have, today, equal rights under the law, and this does not satisfy Sharpton or Jackson. They want revenge against those who were not alive to commit the offenses.

In 1778, Arnold wrote a letter to General Nathanael Greene in which he complained bitterly about the horrid state of America as a nation, the depreciating currency, the disaffection of the army, and internal fighting in Congress. Sound a little close to home?

By that point, Arnold had already distinguished himself in battle against the British in various battles, from February 1777 on. He was shot in the left leg no less than three separate times, and never lost his leg. After the third wound, he refused to have it amputated, and had it crudely set, resulting in his left leg being 2 inches shorter than his right.

During all his military exploits, he was repeatedly passed over for promotion. Granted, he was promoted to major general, but General George Washington did not recognize his seniority over that of lesser-ranked generals, because Arnold’s meteoric rise via battlefield bravery did not, in Washington’s mind, yet prove Arnold’s generalship.

But Arnold cannot be forgiven for what he considered punitive measures America deserved to have taken against it. In May 1779, Arnold began a clandestine correspondence, via Joseph Stansbury, with Major John Andre on the matter of surrendering Fort West Point, New York, to the British in exchange for 20,000 pounds sterling and passage to England.

By August of 1780, Arnold was in total command of West Point and deliberately weakening its defenses by sending men, weapons, food and building supplies to all outlying areas, or to General George Washington’s army, whenever he requested them. This treachery became so obvious that officers at West Point began wondering if Arnold was selling the goods on the black market for his own gain. No one would have dreamed he was trying his level best to hand West Point on a silver platter to the British, until, on September 22, his ship was fired on by the British, who did not know it was Arnold. He was forced to cancel a clandestine meeting with Andre, and Andre’s superior, General Sir Henry Clinton.

He wrote a personal letter for Andre to carry through enemy lines, giving him safe passage, but Andre was still apprehended the next day outside Tarrytown, New York. In his possession were all the intelligence between Arnold and himself and Clinton, papers which were sent immediately to General Washington, who upon reading them, muttered under his breath and refused to repeat what he said.

Andre was hanged as a spy on October 2, 1780. Washington sent men into New York City to kidnap Arnold from his lodging, but Arnold had, unknowingly, changed lodgings and was already on a ship bound for Virginia, and thence to England. He attempted to explain himself in a letter written to all the inhabitants of America, in which he complained of how unfairly he had been treated, and that he acted out of a duty to punish those responsible.

Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, remain the only two civilians ever executed in American history for the crime of treason. While life imprisonment would have sufficed for Julius, and Ethel probably was almost not guilty and deserved at most a year in prison, Julius can, in truth, be largely blamed for the length of the Cold War.

He was convicted on March 29, 1951, of passing American nuclear weapon secrets to the Soviets through multiple spies, especially Anatoli Yakovlev, in order to equalize Soviet nuclear power with America’s. His sympathy toward Communism compelled him to do this, and he saw to it by passing detailed sketches, schematics and letters to the Soviets detailing the construction methods of the implosive “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Due in large part to Rosenberg, the Soviets were able to demonstrate a successful nuclear bomb test on August 29, 1949, at a terrifying rate of knowledge apprehension.

The Cold War would have taken place anyway, but not for another 10 years, perhaps, had it not been for Rosenberg. The Soviets would never have supported Communist North Korea without nuclear weaponry to deter the United States from threatening nuclear attacks to stop Communism from imposing its will on South Korea.

Judge Irving Kaufman said it best, in convicting them, “I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.”

Harding hit his professional stride as a self-made newspaper publisher (a la William Randolph Hearst). It’s a real shame that he appears on this list, because during his term, he oversaw quite a few great progressions in American society. He instituted the Budget and Accounting Act, which requires the President to submit his own personal budget to the Congress for approval every year.

He advocated civil rights for blacks in a time of severely violent racist hate crimes, and attempted to have lynching outlawed, but his bill was voted down in the Senate (leaving lynching legal). He wanted to fund the establishment of a nation for the Jews in Palestine, but never made this desire public. Yet aside from his various good ideas, Harding did not like the idea of blacks and whites in mixed marriages, he reduced the number of immigrants from all foreign countries entering the U. S. to the degree of only 3%, and most deplorably, he saw no problem at all in appointing his close friends to positions of major power in the government.

These friends immediately used their positions for personal gain, as could have been expected, not in the least because they had no qualifications for the jobs to which he appointed them. These friends gave rise to multiple scandals, the worst of them the Teapot Dome Scandal. It was the Watergate of its day, and still may eclipse Watergate in magnitude.

Harding appointed his friend Albert Fall to be Secretary of the Interior, and while almost all oil reserves in the country were to be used for the Navy, Fall leased the ocean of oil under Teapot Dome Mountain, 19 miles north of Casper, Wyoming, to private oil companies that bribed him for the land. Fall was eventually convicted of accepting bribes and went to prison, the first member of a Presidential Cabinet ever to suffer this fate.

It was Albert Fall who, under aggressive interrogation before Congress, finally explained slant drilling like so, “If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake, and my straw reaches across the room and starts to drink your milkshake, I drink your milkshake!”

Harding’s involvement in the scandal is undoubted, but the extent to which he knew of Fall’s amorality is still cause for heated debate. It is certain that he knew Fall was leasing the oil field next to Teapot Dome to private companies, but whether or not he knew of the bribes, he must be criticized heavily for not correcting the matter as soon as he learned of the bidding war between Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny. Doheny is the man on whom Upton Sinclair based Vernon Roscoe in his novel “Oil!” on which “There Will Be Blood” was loosely based.

Johnson is most well-known today for showing up drunk to his own inauguration. The major criticism leveled against him today is that his policies for the reconstruction of the Union did nothing for the rights of freed slaves. Giving them the right to vote, to work for their own livings, these were policies Abraham Lincoln had intended to institute for years.

The reason Johnson abandoned the slaves is because he was desperate to be the man who actually reformed the Union, with the Confederate states repatriated. Lincoln would have, but did not get the chance. So, in his haste, Johnson allowed the Confederate states far too much leeway in deciding their own states’ rights, which was precisely at the heart of the Civil War to begin with. The Confederate states wanted the right to own slaves, and tried their very best to regain that right, freeloading off Johnson’s bent to placate them.

To this end, he repeatedly vetoed civil rights bills set before him, and attempted to explain his reasoning in a cross-country tour in 1866, during which he delivered angry, hate-filled white supremacy to the public, defending the institution of slavery largely on the grounds that reforming the Union at any cost was more important.

This so infuriated a large contingent of Republicans in the Congress that they impeached him on the grounds of violation of the Tenure of Office Act. He fired his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who also held that post under Lincoln. Johnson hated Stanton because Stanton, a Republican in line with Lincoln, wanted to implement Lincoln’s policies of civil rights and freedom for slaves. By firing him against an Act legislated by Congress specifically to keep Stanton in office, Johnson knowingly and willfully acted against the Constitution. His impeachment did not pass the Senate, which spared him by one vote.

Lee Harvey Oswald did not make the list for a number of reasons, prime among them that he may not have acted alone, and secondary that his motives were never adequately surmised. But aside from how preposterous murder is, especially in its capacity to prove some point, Booth made his act of murdering President Abraham Lincoln even more preposterous because of his motive, which he made abundantly clear to acquaintances involved in the plot.

He was a southerner, and not at all happy that the South lost. Now with Lincoln firmly on the throne, Booth saw that it was only a matter of time before Lincoln made good all his promises to the black population. And because he intended to push through legislation that would give blacks all the rights of white people equally, Booth determined, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever give.” That was the motive he gave to his accomplices on April 11, 1865, at the White House, after a speech Lincoln gave intending to enfranchise blacks.

Three days later, on Good Friday 1865, Booth entered the wrong side of the history books when he sneaked into the Presidential box seat and shot Lincoln behind the left ear with a .44 Derringer, then stabbed Major Henry Rathbone twice with a Bowie knife before jumping off the box seat balcony to the stage. His spur caught in the drapery and caused him to turn his left foot under him when he landed, snapping the fibula.

He still got up and limped across the stage, held up his bloody knife and howled, “Sic simper tyrannies!” which is the motto of his home state, Virginia, “Thus always to tyrants!” He then limped outside and rode away on a horse. He lasted 12 days on the lam, until he was caught at the farm of Richard Garrett. He and David Herold, one of his conspirators, took refuge in a tobacco barn. When the soldiers set fire to the barn, Herold surrendered, but Booth shouted over the roar of the flames, “I will not be taken alive!”

He had a rifle and a pistol, but did not fire either before Boston Corbett crept behind the barn and shot through a crack in a wallboard, severing Booth’s spinal cord at the neck. He died in agony three hours later. His last words were spoken to his hands, being held by a soldier in front of his face, “Useless. Useless.” Despite that self-criticism, his murder of Lincoln effectively stalled the civil rights movement for about a hundred years.

Calhoun is now remembered as the man most directly responsible for leading the Southern states to secede from the Union in 1860. He did this by championing slavery as not merely an honorable institution, but thoroughly divine and encouraged by God Himself. Not only was slavery not a necessary evil, but to him, it was “a positive good for the Republic.” To this end, he always cited Genesis 9:25-27, which states, “And [Noah] said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’ And he said, ‘Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.’

It remains to demonstrate how Canaan came to be all black people, and Japheth and Shem came to be all white north Europeans. Calhoun tried his level best, as did countless more before and especially after him, once he showed himself to be the Southern bandwagon to get on; but so far, Canaan has not been related to Africa, and there is even less possibility of a relationship between Shem and Japheth, and northern Europe.

Calhoun, along with almost all the South back then, openly admitted that whites were superior to blacks, that blacks therefore deserved “no more rights than a dog,” and openly threatened the Northern states with secession every time abolition was brought up. He was, at various times, Vice President under J. Q. Adams and Andrew Jackson, US Senator for SC, a Member of the House of Representatives, Secretary of State, and Secretary of War.

He was a fiery and eloquent orator, as most politicians were in those days, but his policies left a lot to be desired. As a Member of Congress, he is the man most directly responsible for declaring war on Great Britain in 1812. Great Britain was, at the time, impressing American merchantmen into the British Navy. This was their only crime for which they could be considered belligerent, but it might have been better solved by diplomacy, which is precisely what diplomacy is for.

Calhoun found diplomacy intolerable. In his eyes, if anyone injured the honor of America, it was time to kill. The War of 1812 was the worst moment of warfare in America’s history. Vietnam resulted in retreat of democracy from Saigon. The War of 1812 result in Washington, D. C. burning to the ground. This was most directly the fault of Calhoun. The war ended in the Treaty of Ghent, but not a stalemate, as is often claimed. A stalemate occurs when neither side can make any gains. In this case, the British could, with difficulty, have sacked and razed multiple major cities had they not also have been at war with Napoleon. They found Napoleon the greater threat and agreed to the treaty so they could devote all their resources to France.

Yet, because this very same sentiment, that of defending one’s honor to the death, was widespread throughout America, Calhoun managed to stay in national politics until his death in 1850, 10 years before the secession and war he called for and desperately wanted in order to defend the Southern states’ right to treat a particular color of human being as something less than human.

Phelps already topped a list of people who give Christianity a bad reputation. But he also gives America a bad one, and his gleeful sadism is worth another examination. His congregation of the Westboro Baptist “Church” spends all its spare time traveling the country and picketing any event they deem at odds with God’s Law, and they’re favorite event is a funeral, preferably that of a soldier killed in action.

That’s right. They actually spew the most offensive insults and promises of divine torture they can think of – for the express purpose of causing as much pain as they can – and they do it in the name of Jesus Christ. Because it is illegal to inflict physical pain (at least in America), the WBC inflicts as much emotional and psychological pain as they can, while hiding behind the 1st Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America (while howling their hatred of said USA).

They are all led by Fred Phelps, and though he is 82 years old as of this list, his disciples (since they are patently not Christ’s disciples) promise to carry on with his legacy of outspoken malice, schadenfreude, hatred, for a long time. Phelps is the real deal. He is a monster. A pure sadist who only abides by the law because he does not want to go to jail. His personality, his nature, his motives, are in effect, identical to those of an Internet troll, which he also is via his multiple websites and videos.

His “sermons” are all the same: God hates America and every single person in it except Phelps. But it’s dismissive to call him a crackpot and be done with him. He went to Vernal, Utah in 1947, when he was 18, and attempted to “convert” Mormons by condemning their religion with intensely disgusting and offensive imagery and profanity. When a Mormon passer-by asked him if people were supposed to obey every single commandment in the Old Testament, all 613 of them, Phelps did not know how to answer. He fumbled about for one, couldn’t come up with it, and so he punched the guy, inciting a melee of about 100 people. Never mind Christianity; that really makes a nation of avowed freedom of religion look great to the rest of the world.

He tried to make illegal kissing in public, and while picketing about it, punched a police officer who told him to leave. He stands on the busiest street corners he can find across the whole country and screams racial slurs at blacks, Mexicans, Asians, everyone who is not white, condemning every stranger who passes by to Hell. Keep in mind that he hides behind the very Constitution he vilifies with every chance he gets.

His reckless hatred fumes so hotly that his routines breach the realm of utter nonsense. In 1997, he actually paid over $5,000 of his own money to send 10 of his churchgoers, including his daughter and right-hand man, Shirley Phelps-Roper, to Baghdad, Iraq, with Saddam Hussein’s permission, to protest America on Baghdad’s busiest street. Phelps claimed that Iraq was the only Muslim state in the world that allowed the free expression of “the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ,” which is patently false. Hussein had by then personally ordered the executions of dozens of Iraqi citizens attempting to preach Christianity in public. But he was only too happy to oblige such representatives of America. When Hussein was executed, Phelps was quick to hit the Internet stating that Hussein was burning in Hell.

Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party in March 1959. At first, he called it the “World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists.” It was headquartered at 928 North Randolph Street in Arlington, Virginia. Rockwell majored in Philosophy at Brown University, and rejected the principle that all men are created equal. It was his belief that equality was forcibly acquired by the stronger, and that birth had nothing to do with it.

He dropped out and was commissioned into the US Navy, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. He married his second wife in Iceland while stationed there, and they honeymooned at Berchtesgaden, Germany, which was Hitler’s “Eagle Nest.” His hatred of Jews began at an early age, and stemmed from his perception of Jews as controlling the entire world through global finances. It was his idea that you could not buy or sell without abiding by the prices set by Jews.

His politics, already reprehensible, were heavily influenced by the rise of the next entry. He actually ran for President in 1964, receiving 212 votes, and although he had shown himself since 1958 to be anti-war, publicly protesting it around the White House, he also hung an 18-foot long swastika in his house, around a photograph of Hitler, and left his window open so everyone could see it as they walked by.

Once he garnered national attention, he held a rally in New York City, stating his desire to be President, and also stating that all Jews would be treated as ordinary citizens, unless they were traitors, but that 80% were traitors already, and would be executed immediately on his order. He said that out loud as if nothing were wrong with saying it, and his audience consisted largely of Jewish counter-protesters, who promptly attacked him with umbrellas and canes, igniting a full-scale riot.

He staged another rally on the National Mall on 4 July, 1960, which also incited a riot. He staged one in 1966 to protest Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march for racial equality and desegregation. Rockwell stated via megaphone over and over that that King’s status as a black man already made him inferior, but his obedience to global Jewish domination made him “even more monstrous.”

He was one of the primary driving influences in the polarization of race in the 1960s. While the Black Panthers were shouting “black power” in public, Rockwell and his Neo-Nazi followers were shouting “white power,” which only galvanized the already bleak situation into further degeneration. He vehemently denied to Alex Haley, who wrote “Roots,” that the Holocaust ever took place, despite quite a bit of proof to the contrary.

Rockwell was assassinated by one of his own men on 25 August, 1967. The assassin, John Patler, fired through Rockwell’s windshield, and one of the bullets severed four major arteries in his upper chest. He bled to death in less than two minutes. Patler served only eight years of a 20-year sentence, which is rather indicative of the low esteem in which Rockwell was held by the public.

Joe McCarthy was the closest any American has ever gotten to making him or herself into an Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin. While the Constitution defended the nation magnificently in stopping him as quickly as it did, he still harmed a great many innocent people before he was brought down. McCarthy was not “the most miserable person who ever lived” as was said, but he did have two extreme vices: he loved to hurt people; and he could not acquire enough power to satisfy him.

He was a monster, a megalomaniac of pure sadism. His politics up until 1944 were liberal and he was registered as a Democrat. But from 1944 to his death in 1957, he sided with the Republican party and displayed himself as the staunchest conservative in the country. It is generally accepted that he switched parties because he saw fear of Communism coming, and wanted to take advantage of it, to prey on that fear, and felt he could best do so by taking a conservative hard-line stance against the Russians. It was the next big thing.

Beginning about February 9, 1950, he rose to the forefront of American politics when he gave a speech in which he purported to have a list of provable Communists currently working in the State Department. He is believed to have said (since there is no record of the speech), “The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205 – a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

So began the infamous 1950s’ “Communist witch-hunt,” and just like the real witch-hunt of 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, people were driven by fear to accuse absolutely anyone of being Communist or supporting the ideology. The entire farce spread to catastrophically grotesque extent because of the public’s general misunderstanding of what Communism even is, and whether it was as dangerous to America as McCarthy would have them believe.

To this end, McCarthy never bothered defining Communism as opposed to Capitalism, but merely denounced the former as all but Satanic. The most hideously laughable aspect of his tyranny is that it was not, nor ever has been, illegal to be Communist in the United States. You are free to hold to any belief, religion, or ideal that pleases you. You may not, of course, force the government to agree with one or another. But then, that’s precisely what McCarthy attempted to do: force the adherence to, or support of, Communism to become illegal. He might have declared war on the Soviet Union, had he been President.

He formed HCUA, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to investigate possible Communists throughout the nation, and absolutely no one was safe from McCarthy. You have to give him credit for having no fear at all, even if it was hubris that caused it, because he unleashed extraordinarily inflammatory rhetoric against Secretary of Defense, Nobel Peace laureate, and five-star General of the Army, George C. Marshall, of being Communist, having allowed Communism to take over China, and declaring that he was guilty of treason.

Then he topped that by denouncing Harry S Truman as Communist, when he relieved General MacArthur of command in Korea, stating that the war room must have gotten Truman drunk first in order for him to be so stupid, and then stating, within earshot of multiple Senators, “The son of a bitch should be impeached.” That’s right. A sitting US Senator actually called the sitting US President a “son of a bitch.”

Then he bulled his way through the United States Army, accusing thousands, from officers to clerks. By this point, he had roused the fury of most of the press, especially Edward R. Murrow of “See It Now,” a weekly TV documentary of current events. Murrow had this to say about McCarthy, “The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it – and rather successfully.”

That infuriated McCarthy, who immediately turned his sights on Murrow, accusing him of collusion with the “Russian espionage and propaganda organization” VOKS. VOKS was trying to open honest, polite diplomacy and trade with America at the time. McCarthy’s accusation against Murrow severely backfired on him because Murrow’s reputation was immaculate in all respects. McCarthy might as well have attacked Jesus Christ.

McCarthy combined this fiasco with another by attacking Joseph Nye Welch, a lawyer and actor, during his Army Inquisition. He accused Welch of being Communist, supporting Communism, and harboring Communists in his law firm, and then attempted to scare Welch off his game by accusing one of his employees, Fred Fisher. It didn’t work. Welch famously responded, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

McCarthy tried again to attack him, but was cut off, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

McCarthy tried yet again to attack him, but Welch answered, “Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this further with you. You have sat within six feet of me and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have seen fit to bring it out. And if there is a God in Heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further. I will not ask Mr. Cohn any more questions. You, Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness.”

At this, the entire room burst into an ovation for Welch, who left angrily. That was on 9 June, 1954. On 2 December of that year, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure McCarthy, which removed him from HCUA. From then on, whenever he railed against Communism on the floor of the Senate, almost no one showed up to listen. Or he was blatantly ignored. He died two and a half years later, on 2 May 1957, of acute hepatitis, brought on by lifelong alcoholism, a born loser if there ever lived one. He had been intent on tearing down the American government and raising himself to power. Democracy defeated him.