Joseph McCarthy ruined my father's life. At least this is what I've come to believe. His failings were a puzzle I was forced to solve with circumstantial evidence and what I admit to be a subjective reading of the parental record. But I am convinced the puzzle has been solved.

You see, my father was never much of a talker, and although he could speak and understand almost four languages-Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and some English-he hardly ever spoke to me in any of them. Mostly he told me to shut up. "Stop yammering like an old woman," he'd say to me when I was six years old and prattling on about something or other, as small children will. "Men don't talk. They just sit." Still, as I grew to manhood, dribs and drabs of information came to me, and from those little packets of "facts," along with my own observations and conversations with my mother and others, I know that McCarthy, a man I never met other than in my childhood nightmares, where he appeared as a large, indistinct, yet hideously frightening boogeyman, cast a shadow over the lives of my family in the Land of Opportunity.

How little I understood about the role of the junior Senator from the state of Wisconsin (Where was Wisconsin? Near Philadelphia, or Montana?) in the dissolution of what I imagined to be normality back in the days when I was growing up in our nice-enough Brooklyn neighborhood. I couldn't have guessed that this fat man on television waving pieces of paper on which he claimed were written names of dozens of "Communists" was actually messing up my life. What I did know was that even in our lower middle-class circle of immigrant families, we were poorer than most. Money was always a problem. A good deal of this owed to the fact that my father was not working much, and when he did, it was at a far lower level than his talents or erudition appeared to merit. There were a lot of boys in the neighborhood whose fathers seemed far dumber than my dad, less cultured and more proletarian in the lumpen sense of the word. Yet these boys had things I didn't. They went to private summer camps when I didn't. They got to brag about what swell schools they were likely to attend, when I didn't. I suppose I knew it had something to do with my father, that he'd turned bitter and began to resent us, his family, for whom he could not provide. But the real blow fell when he left us. I was about twelve, and from what I've been able to glean from self-analysis, I blamed myself for driving him away, though I had no clue whatsoever what was going on in his head. On the other hand, my father's departure was also kind of a relief since he'd been so quick with the strap. It was confusing. On one hand, I missed him; and on the other, with him gone, I got hit less.

He moved to the Lower East Side and after a long absence, he began to come around every few months to suggest that maybe I'd like to live with him in his little tenement apartment on Avenue C. Even then that struck me as an insane choice: leave my friends, my school, and my mom for a hard scrabble existence as the soft new kid in a tough, drug-infested neighborhood. But I had lingering guilt/loyalty issues about my father. I knew he was frustrated and angry and I was his only joy. The resultant pressure was enormous. Ultimately, I decided it had been hard enough finding my place in Brooklyn and I wasn't ready to start over. I started avoiding him. Eventually he stopped coming around. After that maybe I saw him every year or so, occasionally skipping one here or there. I went to see him one winter when I was in college. By now he lived with an old Polish lady on East Tenth Street near Second Avenue, and the neighborhood stank of garbage. When I climbed the three floors to his apartment and rang the bell, he answered on the first ring. He seemed to be smaller and he was glowing. "Come in, let's have a drink." His iron-grey hair had by now turned white but he still wore it in a crewcut. He had on a big bulky sweater and a stocking filled with garlic was draped around his neck. "It's for my cold," he said. Inside on the wall was a two-foot-tall cross, Jesus in white plastic glued to a wooden crucifix. "This is her room," he said. "She's getting close to death. I sleep in the back."

We went into his room -- a sparsely furnished cubby with only a bed, a dresser, and a bottle that said Vodka on the label but was filled with red liquid. "Let's celebrate," he said and he took the bottle I'd brought him, put it away in the bottom drawer, and from his own bottle he poured out two red drinks. "But don't get into the habit." And then we drank: vodka with cranberry juice. Once we settled in, I told him about my summer job as a mop-up night porter with Local 32B because I knew he'd like that. Then I told him I wanted to become a teacher. "Don't be stupid!" he spat. "What you want that for? Stupid! Stupid! You think you so smart but you end up with nothing. Learn a trade, something you can use. Plumber. Carpenter. Or even a cook; people always have to eat. But teacher? A woman's job. It makes me ashamed. Join the Navy and learn something you can use. Don't end up in a slum on the Lower East Side." He could have ended the sentence by saying "like me," but that would have been redundant. Still, it was a good thing to be there then, with my father, this strange, distant man who carried around the burden of a secret, which had ruined his life. Until then, a lot of what I knew about my father was the sort of bare bones biography one might read in a short encyclopedia entry, if any encyclopedia bothered to detail the existence of people like Dad.

My father was born in the Ukraine in 1911 to a family of peasants of the Greco-Catholic faith. World War I began in 1914 and was still raging when the Russian Revolution of 1917 made conditions in the Ukraine even worse. In the famine that followed the fighting, my father lost his mother; without someone to care for them, his two brothers starved to death. My father grew up fatherless, motherless, destined for bitterness. His step-uncle took him in and he worked as a shepherd and slept with the sheep. In winter months, he carried a charred board that he snatched from a fire; when his rag-wrapped feet began to freeze, he'd throw the board down on the frozen earth and jump on it to thaw them.

He left Europe in 1929 and came to America just in time for the Depression, but for him it was as though he had finally joined the carnival of life: there was always a restaurant job washing dishes, and people, people everywhere, and they all had to eat. Work was the reason he had come to this country and even during these "hard times," he always found work-even if it was only working jobs that other people didn't want. He was young and happy in the land of the free and home of the brave, but he wanted to move up, and somehow,within a few years he got himself hooked up with the Merchant Marines. I don't know how. When World War II started, he was a welder in a shipyard in Baltimore.

It was after the war that he made his mistake. He was caught selling issues of the Daily Worker (key word: worker) outside the shipyard. Asked about it, he said while he liked the paper, and had respect for many ideals of the Bolshevik, he nonetheless knew people like him would always be at the mercy of a leader like Stalin. He sold the Daily Worker in accord with a good, solid American work ethic: for the pocket money. This did not, however, stop someone from writing his name down. My father never knew who fingered him or who gave his name to which bureaucrat, who put it in which file, or whose attention it eventually came to. But from that time on, he was suspect. Suddenly unemployable, he retreated to the sweatshops of New York, where a thousand tiny factories pumped out new clothes for the nation, but FBI agents tracked him down. They would visit his place of employment and tell his boss that if he were still on the payroll in two weeks' time, they would have to examine the company's books. Then the boss, following the familiar and cowardly pattern of so many Americans during this peculiar, sad period of our history, would take my father aside with a sad grin and tell him, "Look, I can't afford the risk," and my father would lose his sweatshop job pressing pants for minimum wage. Eventually, my father would get another sweatshop job, but sooner or later the FBI would come calling and Daddy was back on the street.

Now why was it, in this brave, free land of ours that a man could lose his livelihood on mere accusation, without a conviction, without even a trial? What was it that made a generous good-hearted people give up their fellow man, give in to fear, and do so with a sense of relief that it was he, not they, who was facing ruin? My father never exactly knew, or at least he never talked about it. Thinking about it now, he often grumbled about J. Edgar Hoover, the House Un-American Activities Committee and several other Nixonian Commie fighters. But in his mind they had all merged into the central figure of the time: McCarthy. This is when McCarthy began to stalk my dreams. Someone was destroying our lives and we didn't believe in the Devil, so it became the bulbous shouter from Wisconsin. This ghost-goblin haunting the poorly tuned-in black-and-white TV: the repository of everything evil.

"McCarthy," my father said to me that day in his Lower East Side hovel, spittingthe name like a curse. "McCarthy." It was McCarthy who had crushed his dreams, McCarthy who had brought him to this intolerable station.

Over the years, I have read my share about McCarthy, listened to the many complaints about the man. I understand how he made paranoia a basis for self-preservation, how he turned free speech into an act of subversion, and the way he justified persecution and slander under the rubric of patriotism. Due to his machinations, the notion of American rights disappeared overnight. Accusation without evidence became a means to destroy livelihoods and thereby lives. Our culture began to eat its workers. I've read all this and believe it. But for me, this is not a dry argument. McCarthy isn't just someone to invoke every time you don't like the way a politician does things, the way people are sometimes careless tossing around Hitler's name. It is personal. I see it through the admittedly subjective and perhaps diminished prism of my father's life in this country. A fat man holding pieces of paper with names of so-called Communists, who weren't Communists at all - sometimes there were no names on the paper at all - created a cowardly political climate in which others could not keep a job. And for want of a job, family was lost.

I never quite knew about this, and even if I had, I don't know how I might have helped my father. There were opportunities, I know now. I recall one such forty-five-year-old occasion. It was before he left us, when we used to take walks, just the two of us. We went to Prospect Park, near my house in Brooklyn. He didn't talk at all, and we sat down on a bench together in silence. I was starting to get restless when all of a sudden I saw this kid from school, a kid who was always on my case, a bully. I sat tight because I knew that if I got up we'd just have to fight. This kid turned out to be with his father, someone who knew my father.

"Sasha, you godless Bolshevik," called the man to my father, "how're you feeding your family these days?" "You got work?" As it turned out, my father had worked for the man, someone who might pass for a petty capitalist overlord in the rubric of the Daily Worker. "Oh, I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. Let's go to the pavilion for a beer and I'll see if I can't come up with something." So in they went, and his boy gave me an evil smirk. Didn't say anything. Chucked pebbles at me. I sat on the ground, closed my eyes, felt the sting. Soon enough my dad came out, beer in hand, with this kid's old man.The kid's father was smiling; mine was stone. "Hey, Billy," the man called to his son." I got a bet here with Sasha that my boy can lick his boy." And Billy was on me like a cat. But soon enough, I got up, kicked him in the stomach, knocked him down. My stone-faced old man didn't seem to be rooting for me. "No kicking," he said. And Billy was there again, clawing, spitting, raging. I tried boxing, but he just came in. I got in another kick, knocked him down again. At this point my father interceded, took me aside. Eyes shut, he whispered: "Don't kick. Now you must let him knock you down."Daddy!" "Let him."And Billy was back, windmilling. I meant to put up my hands, but he caught me, just under the right eye. I went down. There didn't seem to be much point in getting up. So I cried. It was clear to me, then, the nature of the "bet" my father made with Billy's father. Like Charley in On the Waterfront, he sold me out, set me up to get beaten and humiliated. His humiliation became mine. The truth is, I don't even know if my father got whatever job the man claimed he'd get after I was beaten up. My father, possibly out of shame, wouldn't even look at me then. After that, I didn't see him for a long, long time. You might imagine this to be irrational, but I blame McCarthy for that too. It was McCarthy and his brethren who put my father into such desperate straits that he was willing to use me like a pit-bull. It didn't matter if I'd managed to kick that kid's butt or not. My father, and by extension our family, was already lost.

Now, you might dispute all this, and wonder why my little saga of life under McCarthyism matters much in the scope of all the other miserable things this man did during his brief but bilious reign as America's Grand Inquisitor. Certainly McCarthy ruined the lives of other, possibly grander personages than my father. It is possible that my father could have called upon other resources, dug deep within himself to overcome the oppressive failure he encountered. You might even say that he was psyched out by McCarthy, that McCarthy and the sway he held over many frightened, paranoid, immigrant-hating people in this country was at least partially in my father's head. You might think that. But to be sure, the existence of Joseph McCarthy and the sleazy ethic he imbued didn't do my father any good, especially when all Dad wanted to be was a good American.

There is something of a happy ending to all this, since my father has managed to survive. He just turned ninety-two and lives in Miami. Whether due to many years of drinking, or simply old age, his thinking and memory are not so clear. This has its upside. Each year, along with his memory, he loses some of his bitterness. Recently, when I visited him at the adult home where he lives, he couldn't even remember being blacklisted. His memory of life as a working man without work has passed as have recollections of visits from the FBI. The name McCarthy, which used to elicit a torrent of cursing, draws a bemused blank. Each year he is a little purer, a little closer to heaven, forgetting as he sits in the warm Miami sun while McCarthy, dead at age forty-eight from a nerve disorder exacerbated by alcohol abuse, rots in the dirt. So maybe there is a God, after all.