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Mon 04 Apr 2007An Irishman's DiaryFifty years ago this week, on May 2nd, 1957, US Senator Joe McCarthy died from liver disease, aged 48. Condemned by the Senate, rejected by the populace, he was physically and emotionally wrecked; it seemed scarcely credible that a few years earlier he had been one of the most recognised and feared men in the United States.The son of a Tipperary mother and an Irish-American father, McCarthy grew up in a heavily Catholic enclave of rural Wisconsin. On the strength of a highly misrepresented war record, he was elected to the Senate in 1946, riding a wave of postwar Republican success that appeared to reject Franklin Roosevelt's liberal New Deal agenda.