McCarthy in Wheeling, February 8, 1950
Courtesy of Marquette University Archives

McCarthy gave his infamous Communists in the State Department speech the next day. Interest by the national media after the Wheeling address surprised McCarthy.

On February 9, 1950, McCarthy told a ladies' Republican club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that Communists worked for the State Department. He said these Communists fooled the Truman administration into supporting a foreign policy which contributed to the spread of Communism. The growing influence of the Soviet Union worldwide seemed to prove McCarthy's claim.

McCarthy brought his Communists-in-government charges to the Senate in late February 1950. The Senate sent the charges to a special committee headed by Democratic Senator Millard Tydings. The Tydings Committee dismissed McCarthy's accusations for lack of evidence in July. But the beginning of the Korean War and the arrest of an atomic spy named Julius Rosenberg overshadowed the Committee's findings. Many anxious Americans saw McCarthy as a patriotic politician fighting dangerous traitors.

• The Korean War began while the Senate investigated McCarthy's Communists in the State Department charges. Communist North Korea attacked American-supported South Korea on June 25, 1950. President Truman sent American troops into battle as part of a United Nations police action. Almost 54,000 American soldiers lost their lives by the war's ended on July 27, 1953. The armistice re-established pre-war borders between North and South Korea.
  
  
• Three days after the Tydings Committee dismissed McCarthy's charges of Communists-in-government, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Julius Rosenberg for espionage. He supplied the Soviet Union with information about American atomic-bomb research from the "Manhattan Project" during World War II. American courts convicted Julius and his wife, Ethel, of espionage and electrocuted them on June 19, 1953. Later intelligence information confirmed the charge against Julius.