Excerpt from "Speech on Communists in the U.S. State Department Made Before the Women's Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, February 1950"

Available at CNN Interactive: Cold War (Web site)

"Ladies and gentlemen, can there be anyone here tonight who is so blind as to say that the war is not on? Can there be anyone who fails to realize that the communist world has said,'The time is now'—that this is the time for the showdown between the democratic Christian world and the communist atheistic world? Unless we face this fact, we shall pay the price that must be paid by those who wait too long."

U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908–1957) of Wisconsin influenced the Cold War (1945–91) as much as or more than any other single American. He took the extreme concerns about communism and homeland security that citizens had and created a national hysteria....