Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt

"Joe McCarthy's Cold War witch-hunts targeted people with same-sex attractions as much, maybe more than those with Communist sympathies." This introduction to Rodger McDaniel's book sets the stage for a story of the most wretched political blackmail in American history. Lester Hunt was the kind of person we'd all want to be a part of our national government. Kind and empathetic, honest and hardworking, he was as one of his eulogists said, "ill prepared for the cruel, brutal, rough aspect of national partisan politics." Hunt committed suicide in his Senate office in 1954. His death was tragic enough. Yet readers will find even more about which to lament reading of his extraordinary life. Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins is not only Lester Hunt's story. It's the story of America during the virulent years of the early Cold War, of McCarthyism, and the way the voluntary death of a Wyoming senator helped to bring the curtain down on Joe McCarthy.